The Devil's Trill
EMILY HUGHES
Larghetto Affettuoso.
Henry inhaled. His breath echoed the rhythm in his head as he made his entrance. He felt the metal string slide under his fingertips and pressed down to produce the correct notes. He made his bow stroke light and fast. A cry, like wind through a tunnel, spoke from the strings, always a favorite on the streets of Chicago. He let his fingers slide down the string and pressed them harder into the fingerboard. At the same time, he leaned into his bow. Thunder resounded from deep within the violin to cut through the wind’s cry. He imagined the sound of the orchestra playing underneath his melody. He heard the violins filling space with sixteenth note arpeggios, the cellos and basses adding depth with long tones, and the wind instruments providing spots of color. Henry’s fingers struck the fingerboard like rain drops striking a body of water.
Henry let the last note ring in the air for a few second before he let out the breath he had been holding and lowered his violin. He heard scattered applause from the crowd of shoppers that had stopped to listen to him. His lips twitched, but he tried not to smile because he always thought he had the grin of a gargoyle. Most members of the crowd walked away, but a few approached him and placed money in the case at his feet. A robust woman leaned in and asked Henry where he learned to play the violin.
“Chicago’s very own DePaul School of Music,” he replied. She looked doubtful, despite the honesty of his words. Admittedly, he did neglect to inform her that he never graduated. He had studied at the college for four semesters, and he would have graduated if he hadn’t been called away by the music Chicago’s streets. The woman pressed him further and asked him what he was playing.
“Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor,” he replied. “It’s one of the few I still have memorized. Time has stolen most of my repertoire.”
“Well here,” she said, placing a $10 bill in his case. “Use this to buy some new sheet music.”
Henry thanked her profusely. During the day, most people only gave him one dollar, two if he was lucky. He usually had to play all day to get enough money to buy dinner from a street vendor and pay his rent.
Henry didn’t live in a typical motel. It had only one truly livable room, which was rented out by rich gentlemen who needed a discreet place to spend the night with their mistresses. The owner of the motel, John, didn’t have enough guests to keep up with the costs, so he allowed Henry to live in one of the uninhabitable rooms and Henry paid what he could and repaired anything that stopped working in the building.
In all honesty, Henry knew he should give the ten dollars to John, but the woman had given it to him on the condition that he bought sheet music with it. And besides, this was an investment-- he would get new music to perform on the street, which would bring in more money. Conscience justified, he packed up his violin and began walking towards the music shop.
Henry approached the building that had been taunting him for the past seven years, ever since he found himself on the streets. The stone pillars climbed into the sky, etched with intricate designs. The arch of each spire came to a point. At first, the mahogany front door resisted his efforts, but he pulled harder and managed to create a wide enough gap to slip inside. He walked past an elevator that would not have been out of place in a Marx Brothers movie, complete with sliding metal grate door and operator. Henry decided to take the stairs.
As he climbed the last step, he saw the doors to the music shop. Someone had handpainted “Chicago Strings: Luthier and Music Shop” over the door in cursive. Grime coated the glass door and a layer of dust stood on the red trim.
Henry gripped the handle, shaped like a scroll, and began to second guess himself. He should give the money to John, or at least spend it on food, he thought. But he steeled himself-- he would only get the least expensive sheet music.
He pushed the door open and heard a tinkling that sounded like the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The music emboldened him and he stepped inside. The sound of footsteps forewarned him of the shopkeepers approach. A crooked old man stepped into the front room and beamed at Henry.
“I knew I heard someone enter! Bum-bum-bum- BUUMM! Beethoven Five, yes? Welcome, dear sir.” The exuberant salutation took Henry by surprise and he immediately felt inclined to leave, but before he could step back the man rushed forward and shook his hand vigorously. “My name is Robert Wesley, I am the owner of Chicago Strings: Luthier and Music Shop! How can I help you?”
Henry, worried he’d made a terrible mistake, tried to explain to Robert that he only wanted new sheet music. Robert, still gleeful as ever, guided Henry to the music room in the back of the shop. To get there, they had to walk through the instrument room. Instruments at every stage of creation covered each surface in the room. Violin bodies that still needed to be carved out were strewn across the countertops, cellos waiting for fingerboards stood sentinel, and a double bass which only lacked varnish lurked in the corner. Completed instruments lined the walls, all skillfully made by hand. Henry had to drag himself away from the line of violins.
Once among the piles of music, the man asked Henry what he wanted more specifically. Henry had planned on looking through the music himself, but this room was clearly not conducive for browsing. Henry decided to be straightforward and asked for the cheapest thing Robert had. Robert pondered this and inquired as to Henry’s skill level. Henry figured he might as well be completely honest. He told Robert the same thing he had told the woman on the street.
Robert seemed eager to conquer the feat: something cheap that would challenge a skilled performer, yet also entertain the Chicago masses. He spent several minutes sitting with his head in his hands, mumbling compositions to himself while Henry stood uncomfortably in the doorway. Robert jumped up and ran to a stack of music in the corner. He brushed his fingers down the stack and stopped near the bottom. With the skill of a practiced hand, he pulled a single booklet from the stack. He walked towards Henry and handed him the sheet music to Sonata in G minor by Tartini.
According to Robert, the sonata became known as the Devil’s Trill after a story came out from the composer, Tartini. Tartini had dreamt that he made a pact with the devil. In exchange for Tartini’s soul, the devil played violin for him. The sonata the Devil played for him was so darkly beautiful that he forgot to breathe. He woke up gasping and composed his best interpretation of the song he had dreamt, which he secretly called the Devil’s Sonata.
Henry inquired as to the price, worried that Tartini’s sonata would still be too expensive, but the man smiled and said, “Today, it is free. After you’ve mastered the music, come back and play it for me and you can trade it out for a new piece. I make enough money selling instruments to schools and to the Chicago symphony players.” The man waved away Henry’s thanks and shooed him out of the shop, telling him to get to work on that sonata.
Before Henry allowed himself to return to the motel to play the Sonata, he forced himself to work the streets a bit more. The after dinner hour was always the most profitable. Henry walked among his favorite spots until he found a vacated one. Henry had been playing for around ten minutes when he saw a young couple approaching. They looked young enough to still be in college. Henry immediately began playing up the romanticism of the piece he played. He used wide vibrato and slid into notes so they whined in a melodramatic way. As the couple got closer and eventually stood just in front of Henry, he made sure to bring his eyes to meet the girl’s more often than not. She smiled through a blush and looked down, her mouse brown hair falling all around her face. Her date glared at Henry, looking as though he were trying to communicate telepathically. In a way, he was. Henry simply smiled and looked around at the rest of the crowd, feigning innocence. After Henry finished the song, the girl and her date approached Henry. The boy, still glaring, dropped a ten dollar note into Henry's violin case, and his girlfriend turned her adoring eyes away from Henry to land on her date. The boy pulled her away, and Henry packed up for the evening.
While he walked, Henry considered how the girl seemed to value adoration of art through large sums of money more than the actual art. Initially this troubled Henry, but he decided it was fine by him so long as he kept the money and the art. Caught up in his thoughts, he didn’t realize how far he had walked until he arrived in the lobby.
John sat behind the front desk, staring at spider on his desk. The spider lacked a leg and limped in an attempt to move forward. John seemed too focused on the spider to pay any attention to Henry’s greeting until Henry held out his earnings for the day.
John snatched the money out of his hand and counted it with a smirk. He didn’t say a word to Henry, who walked back to his room. There, he rinsed the city grime off his hands and face, not that it much improved his complexion. He wondered how he appeared to Robert. Unable to resist, Henry studied his face in the mirror. A layer of white residue covered the mirror, but he could still see more of his reflection than he preferred. His skin was rough and discolored, seemingly stained the same grayish color as the Chicago streetscape. The lower half of his face covered in sporadic patches of hair that his two-year-old disposable razor couldn’t seem to cut. His hair was disheveled and had been cut unevenly with a piece of a broken beer bottle. His hazel eyes looked prematurely aged, the way they sagged down at the corners; his lips were the same. Henry turned away from the mirror, feeling much less composed than when he had entered the room. He looked for a place to set his music.
It had been ages since he’d read from sheet music. He didn’t have a stand to place the music on, nor anything to stick it to the wall, save a piece of chewed gum, once pink but aged into a grayish purple. He resolved to just lay it atop the wobbly dresser of missing drawers. He would have to arch his back uncomfortably in order to read the notes.
Henry removed the bow from his case and coated it with rosin. He drew the bow across the chunk of hard, amber rosin, which he had from his days at the university. He knew despite the disheveled hair of the bow and the warped rosin, he could make his instrument sing; but without rosin, there was no hope. He unpacked his violin and brushed his hand over the back of the instrument. After seeing the newly made instruments, Henry wanted to inspect his violin. He stroked the perfect, natural curves on the scroll and the shoulders of the instrument. He traced the f-holes on either side of the bridge, which somehow managed to support the tension in the strings, despite its brittle frailty. He ran his fingers over strings that were starting to unravel. The imperfection didn’t take away from the beauty. He felt his violin’s injuries, the places the wood had been chipped. He brushed his fingers across the areas where the varnish had worn away into dark roses on the wood.
Henry cradled the violin between his shoulder and chin. He drew his bow across the strings and heard it sing, the mirror of a voice. He turned the tight pegs until the pitch in the air matched the one in his head. He hunched over his music and played the first notes of Tartini’s sonata.
Allegro
The first movement sounded sedate. He played each note with a long bow stroke and moved his hand back and forth with wide vibrato. Carried away with the romanticism of the piece, he slid into the notes as he shifted to the upper register of his instrument. He felt the string under his rough, calloused fingertip and strained to make the sound more prominent. The more he played, the more he felt the raw emotion in the piece. Each note pleading with growing intensity and fading away in tragic relief.
The second movement brought an attack, completely different than the first. The smooth, legato notes of the previous movement gave way to sharp, accented bow strokes. He went from the tinny E string down to the heavy G string and his right hand grew heavier to match the intensity of the notes.
After he played the last note, he became aware of a loud thumping outside his door. “Damn it Henry, it’s been hours! It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake. Keep it down!” John yelled from the hallway.
Henry called out an apology, but John had already stomped out of earshot. Henry reluctantly put his violin away. He knew he should go to sleep himself, he would have to be well rested if he wanted to give a good performance the next day, and he had a hard enough time getting money on his best days. But he couldn’t make his mind stop spiraling. He lay with his eyes closed and replayed the sonata in his head, desperate to know what the rest sounded like. He rose out of the worn bed to consult the sheet music several times until he remembered enough to satisfy him. A few hours later, he fell into a restless sleep.
***
Henry woke up early the next morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He tried to ignore the lumps and dents in the mattress as he stared at the white popcorn textured ceiling. The paint had glitter mixed into it-- a cheap imitation of the night sky. His thoughts meandered around the room. He should get up. He should go out on the street-- he needed the money. But Tartini’s created his greatest composition in bed, surely that meant something. Henry could lie there for a few more moments, maybe something great would come of it. The sunbeams from his window grew longer and brighter, illuminating the heavy dust motes in the air. The sight made Henry cough.
At midday, he rose at last. After rinsing the sleep from his face in the bathroom sink, he picked up his violin and left the room. As he walked out of the motel, he saw an embarrassed looking man in a suit and a beautiful woman in a green dress with sad eyes exiting the motel. When they reached the street, they went in opposite directions. Henry, not wanting to accompany either of them, crossed the street and made his way in a third direction.
He planted himself next to a gothic bridge and began playing the Sibelius that had brought him so much fortune the previous day. From a technical point of view, Henry played better today than he had before, but the music felt wrong. He played mechanically and he found the melodies cold and dull.
He played the final notes of the concerto and bowed stiffly to the scattered applause. Some dropped a couple bucks in his open case, but the majority turned and started walking away. People often stopped to listen without paying, but today, with his hollow stomach and bored fingers, he got angry.
“That’s it?” Henry yelled, surprising himself. “Do you even know what I just played?” He continued yelling in his head, You should pay fifty dollars for that kind of performance, and you can’t spare a couple bucks? I’m the best Goddamn violinist on the streets of Chicago!
Not surprisingly, the crowd didn’t come back to pay, but rather rushed away more quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Henry saw a uniformed officer making his way towards the disturbance. Henry immediately put his instrument away and sprinted off through the mass of people; he didn’t have a permit to play on the streets. Most officers overlooked this for talented musicians, but once he became a nuisance, he couldn’t be overlooked.
Luckily, Henry had made a bit of money before the incident. He made his way to the nearest street vendor and bought a hotdog with everything on it. He ate the entire thing in three bites, but the food did nothing to sate his hunger. He approached the vendor again and bought two more. He hesitated for a moment, remembering his debt to John, but Henry’s hunger grew stronger than his conviction. Before long, he ate both hot dogs in a few bites and wanted more. The vendor looked confused as he returned for a third time, and his confusion turned to irritation when Henry revealed his lack of money. The vender turned him away, not even listening to his pleading or his offers to pay more later. Once he realized he wouldn’t get any more food from the man, Henry yelled an insult at the vender and returned to the motel to work on the sonata.
Grave.
“You call that music-- I’m surprised you make any money with that God awful sound! Save it for the streets. If I hear one more note, you’re gone,” John said. He slammed the door and a crack in the wood splintered a bit farther.
Henry couldn’t help but agree with the harsh words. He had been playing the cadenza, the hardest part of the sonata, for hours, and still, the Devil’s Trill eluded him. He only managed a grotesque combination of notes with out of tune double stops. The trill only worsened the effect, like using a bit of lace to cover up a blood stain.
Henry carefully packed up his violin, more out of habit than anything else, and stared at his case. At first he sat on his bed, but the sight of his music on the wobbly dresser mocked him, so he walked out into the motel lobby and sat on a ratty floral couch with questionable stains. He didn’t know what to do. He had given his entire life to music. He never asked for more. He worked at his craft everyday, improving bit by bit. Even when he ran out of money and took up residence in the sketchy motel, he continued working, continued playing his instrument. He’d lived his entire life with one mindset, one reason for living, and all of a sudden he discovered he wasn’t enough; what did that make him?
Several minutes passed before he noticed a woman sitting next to him, the same woman he had seen leaving the motel that morning, the woman in a green dress with sad eyes. He noticed the delicate black lines that drew a pattern over her silk dress. She had short blond hair which curled at the tips, and scarlet lipstick which clung to her lips. She seemed to notice Henry staring, and he looked away.
“I saw you this morning,” she said in a light, airy voice.
“Yeah, I saw you too,” he replied. They sat in an uncomfortable silence for several minutes. “What brings you here this evening?”
Henry regretted the words as soon as they left his lips. She declined to reply and began inspecting her fingernails. He too, looked at her fingernails. His eyes traveled up her arm. He noticed her bare shoulder, curved slightly to the front. Her neck, long and thin, extended forward. Her dress clung to her breasts and gathered beneath them. The silk material fell above her knee, but as she sat with her legs crossed, the dress slid up her leg with every shift of her body. She noticed him staring, scoffed, and turned away. He knew he should look away, but with her backless dress he noticed the curve of her back, so similar to that of a violin. In his mind, he drew the f-holes around her spine and imagined guiding his hand across her skin, feeling for worn off varnish or chips in the wood. His gaze reached up her spine to where her neck met her hair. Her curls imitated the exact shape of a scroll.
In the next instant, man in a suit strode into the room and stood before them. Henry looked away from the girl, but not before the man noticed the subject of his gaze. His eyes clearly warned Henry to clear off, but before he could move the woman rose and began walking towards their room. After a few moments of his scathing glare, the man followed his mistress.
Henry leaned back into the couch and gazed unseeing at the wall. His mind emptied and a certain buzzing filled his ears. He didn’t want to move anymore. He didn’t move, he didn’t see, he didn’t think, he barely breathed. He remained slumped and still against the couch.
He began to see the object of his stare. He saw the off-white wall with grime sticking to the rough texture. He saw his feet in the same brown tennis shoes he had first walked off the college campus in. He observed his hands-- the hands that had played violin for so many hours. He examined his fingertips: the tips of all four fingers on his left hand were calloused from the extended amount of time in contact with the metal strings; the tip of his thumb and the side of his index finger on his right hand were rough from the hours guiding horsehair across the strings. Henry didn’t want these fingers, primed for violin, to go to waste. He didn’t want to lose the music that went from his head to his fingers. He didn’t want to stop playing. But at the moment, he couldn’t make the effort to rise from the couch.
Cadenza
“What are you doing out here?” John yelled, probably angry that Henry was in view for the real guests of the motel.
Henry woke up gasping with his heart beating wildly in his chest. He could still see his dream--the woman in a green dress sitting next to him, playing his sonata. Her sad eyes gazing into him, into the darkest corners of his mind, as she played perfectly. Henry looked out the window. The sky was still dark. He shook his head slightly and felt the last few notes of the cadenza fall away. He stood and walked away, barely hearing the angry exclamations from John behind him.
Henry threw open the door to his room and it slammed against the wall. He ignored the resounding thud and the sound of the crack widening. He knelt down on the floor and undid the latch on his case. He quickly attached the shoulder rest and turned the screw to tighten his bow. He stepped up to the wobbly dresser holding the sheet music and placed the bow halfway between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge.
The sound poured out of him in a frenzied passion. He drew his bow recklessly across the strings. Hairs tore and split, they became wisps of smoke still attached to his bow. He placed his fingers haphazardly across the strings. The notes were technically flawed, but with raw emotion filling his ears, Henry heard only perfection.
He thought of the crowd in front of the bridge. He felt his wrath towards them as if they had just walked away from him. He thought scathingly of thesuccessful musicians with half his talent, half his passion. He lusted over the memory of the green dress sliding up the woman’s leg. He remembered the leaden feeling in his limbs and feeling unable to move or breathe. He gorged himself with the deep sound of the low notes as he pushed still harder into the string. A popping sound interrupted the flow and a whiplike, metal string slashed across Henry’s face. He halted his playing when he saw the droplet of red blood strike the black and white page of his music. Shock caused Henry’s hands to loosen and his violin fell to the ground, scroll first. The neck snapped in two and imitated the sound of the crack in the door.
“What the Hell--” John began to say, standing in the open doorway.
Henry roared in frustration and, without hesitation, he ripped the sheet music from the dresser with one hand and stole the rosin with the other. Then he rushed from the room as John stepped aside, looking fearful. As Henry tore down the hall, a doorway opened, revealing the half dressed man and woman in the lover’s suite. The man poked his head out, presumably to find the source of the commotion. But he, like John, reared back to get out of Henry’s way.
A few moments later, Henry had forgotten them entirely. He sprinted down the dark street. The cold wind bit into his face and tried to steal the music from his hand, but Henry held the flimsy paper tighter and embraced the pain. He hardly knew where he went until he saw the spires and the arches that came to a point.
The combination of the force of his speed and the wind, which had shifted to push him from behind, helped him open the heavy mahogany doors. He passed the old elevator and bounded up the stairs, tripping often and using his hands to push himself up so that he imagined looking like some great beast who couldn’t walk on two legs.
Henry finally stopped sprinting and gripped the rosin tighter in his hand. He pulled his arm back and flung the cake of rosin as hard as he could towards the glass door. They both shattered simultaneously into a thousand pieces, the transparent glass pieces combined with the shards of burnt orange rosin in the air.
Before the glass hit the ground, Henry sprinted through the doorway and received a deep cut from a shard of glass still protruding from the frame. He ignored the added droplets of blood as they dripped onto his music, and he headed straight towards the violins. He picked up the master piece, the violin which had been finished only a few hours earlier.
Then he began the sonata again from the very beginning. He forced his fingers to be calm for the Larghetto Affettuoso, but their tone revealed that he held back a certain violence, some of which he released in the Allegro. He pulled his bow across the strings angrily, impatiently, and he planted his left hand fingers with enough force to make them speak without the bow. He had to pull back for the Grave. He held his breath and let the sorrow of defeat fill his mind, the sound of hidden violence yet more intense. He let the last note ring in the air for tense seconds. Then, with a sharp retake of his bow, he attacked the Cadenza. His fingers flew across the strings bringing forth more notes than could be possible for one violin. An entire orchestra spilled forth from his instrument. He bowed with more force, trilled with more fury, and his string crossings became more hectic. The feeling of running at a dead sprint, the feeling of screaming. He felt every instrument in the room, the orchestra, enter with him for the Adagio. He reached the final notes of the piece and played with longer, heavier bows than physics would allow. Upon the release, Henry heard the strings of the other instruments in the shop still reverberating with sympathetic vibrations. It was over in an instant, and the silence sounded broken in Henry’s ears.
EMILY HUGHES
Larghetto Affettuoso.
Henry inhaled. His breath echoed the rhythm in his head as he made his entrance. He felt the metal string slide under his fingertips and pressed down to produce the correct notes. He made his bow stroke light and fast. A cry, like wind through a tunnel, spoke from the strings, always a favorite on the streets of Chicago. He let his fingers slide down the string and pressed them harder into the fingerboard. At the same time, he leaned into his bow. Thunder resounded from deep within the violin to cut through the wind’s cry. He imagined the sound of the orchestra playing underneath his melody. He heard the violins filling space with sixteenth note arpeggios, the cellos and basses adding depth with long tones, and the wind instruments providing spots of color. Henry’s fingers struck the fingerboard like rain drops striking a body of water.
Henry let the last note ring in the air for a few second before he let out the breath he had been holding and lowered his violin. He heard scattered applause from the crowd of shoppers that had stopped to listen to him. His lips twitched, but he tried not to smile because he always thought he had the grin of a gargoyle. Most members of the crowd walked away, but a few approached him and placed money in the case at his feet. A robust woman leaned in and asked Henry where he learned to play the violin.
“Chicago’s very own DePaul School of Music,” he replied. She looked doubtful, despite the honesty of his words. Admittedly, he did neglect to inform her that he never graduated. He had studied at the college for four semesters, and he would have graduated if he hadn’t been called away by the music Chicago’s streets. The woman pressed him further and asked him what he was playing.
“Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor,” he replied. “It’s one of the few I still have memorized. Time has stolen most of my repertoire.”
“Well here,” she said, placing a $10 bill in his case. “Use this to buy some new sheet music.”
Henry thanked her profusely. During the day, most people only gave him one dollar, two if he was lucky. He usually had to play all day to get enough money to buy dinner from a street vendor and pay his rent.
Henry didn’t live in a typical motel. It had only one truly livable room, which was rented out by rich gentlemen who needed a discreet place to spend the night with their mistresses. The owner of the motel, John, didn’t have enough guests to keep up with the costs, so he allowed Henry to live in one of the uninhabitable rooms and Henry paid what he could and repaired anything that stopped working in the building.
In all honesty, Henry knew he should give the ten dollars to John, but the woman had given it to him on the condition that he bought sheet music with it. And besides, this was an investment-- he would get new music to perform on the street, which would bring in more money. Conscience justified, he packed up his violin and began walking towards the music shop.
Henry approached the building that had been taunting him for the past seven years, ever since he found himself on the streets. The stone pillars climbed into the sky, etched with intricate designs. The arch of each spire came to a point. At first, the mahogany front door resisted his efforts, but he pulled harder and managed to create a wide enough gap to slip inside. He walked past an elevator that would not have been out of place in a Marx Brothers movie, complete with sliding metal grate door and operator. Henry decided to take the stairs.
As he climbed the last step, he saw the doors to the music shop. Someone had handpainted “Chicago Strings: Luthier and Music Shop” over the door in cursive. Grime coated the glass door and a layer of dust stood on the red trim.
Henry gripped the handle, shaped like a scroll, and began to second guess himself. He should give the money to John, or at least spend it on food, he thought. But he steeled himself-- he would only get the least expensive sheet music.
He pushed the door open and heard a tinkling that sounded like the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The music emboldened him and he stepped inside. The sound of footsteps forewarned him of the shopkeepers approach. A crooked old man stepped into the front room and beamed at Henry.
“I knew I heard someone enter! Bum-bum-bum- BUUMM! Beethoven Five, yes? Welcome, dear sir.” The exuberant salutation took Henry by surprise and he immediately felt inclined to leave, but before he could step back the man rushed forward and shook his hand vigorously. “My name is Robert Wesley, I am the owner of Chicago Strings: Luthier and Music Shop! How can I help you?”
Henry, worried he’d made a terrible mistake, tried to explain to Robert that he only wanted new sheet music. Robert, still gleeful as ever, guided Henry to the music room in the back of the shop. To get there, they had to walk through the instrument room. Instruments at every stage of creation covered each surface in the room. Violin bodies that still needed to be carved out were strewn across the countertops, cellos waiting for fingerboards stood sentinel, and a double bass which only lacked varnish lurked in the corner. Completed instruments lined the walls, all skillfully made by hand. Henry had to drag himself away from the line of violins.
Once among the piles of music, the man asked Henry what he wanted more specifically. Henry had planned on looking through the music himself, but this room was clearly not conducive for browsing. Henry decided to be straightforward and asked for the cheapest thing Robert had. Robert pondered this and inquired as to Henry’s skill level. Henry figured he might as well be completely honest. He told Robert the same thing he had told the woman on the street.
Robert seemed eager to conquer the feat: something cheap that would challenge a skilled performer, yet also entertain the Chicago masses. He spent several minutes sitting with his head in his hands, mumbling compositions to himself while Henry stood uncomfortably in the doorway. Robert jumped up and ran to a stack of music in the corner. He brushed his fingers down the stack and stopped near the bottom. With the skill of a practiced hand, he pulled a single booklet from the stack. He walked towards Henry and handed him the sheet music to Sonata in G minor by Tartini.
According to Robert, the sonata became known as the Devil’s Trill after a story came out from the composer, Tartini. Tartini had dreamt that he made a pact with the devil. In exchange for Tartini’s soul, the devil played violin for him. The sonata the Devil played for him was so darkly beautiful that he forgot to breathe. He woke up gasping and composed his best interpretation of the song he had dreamt, which he secretly called the Devil’s Sonata.
Henry inquired as to the price, worried that Tartini’s sonata would still be too expensive, but the man smiled and said, “Today, it is free. After you’ve mastered the music, come back and play it for me and you can trade it out for a new piece. I make enough money selling instruments to schools and to the Chicago symphony players.” The man waved away Henry’s thanks and shooed him out of the shop, telling him to get to work on that sonata.
Before Henry allowed himself to return to the motel to play the Sonata, he forced himself to work the streets a bit more. The after dinner hour was always the most profitable. Henry walked among his favorite spots until he found a vacated one. Henry had been playing for around ten minutes when he saw a young couple approaching. They looked young enough to still be in college. Henry immediately began playing up the romanticism of the piece he played. He used wide vibrato and slid into notes so they whined in a melodramatic way. As the couple got closer and eventually stood just in front of Henry, he made sure to bring his eyes to meet the girl’s more often than not. She smiled through a blush and looked down, her mouse brown hair falling all around her face. Her date glared at Henry, looking as though he were trying to communicate telepathically. In a way, he was. Henry simply smiled and looked around at the rest of the crowd, feigning innocence. After Henry finished the song, the girl and her date approached Henry. The boy, still glaring, dropped a ten dollar note into Henry's violin case, and his girlfriend turned her adoring eyes away from Henry to land on her date. The boy pulled her away, and Henry packed up for the evening.
While he walked, Henry considered how the girl seemed to value adoration of art through large sums of money more than the actual art. Initially this troubled Henry, but he decided it was fine by him so long as he kept the money and the art. Caught up in his thoughts, he didn’t realize how far he had walked until he arrived in the lobby.
John sat behind the front desk, staring at spider on his desk. The spider lacked a leg and limped in an attempt to move forward. John seemed too focused on the spider to pay any attention to Henry’s greeting until Henry held out his earnings for the day.
John snatched the money out of his hand and counted it with a smirk. He didn’t say a word to Henry, who walked back to his room. There, he rinsed the city grime off his hands and face, not that it much improved his complexion. He wondered how he appeared to Robert. Unable to resist, Henry studied his face in the mirror. A layer of white residue covered the mirror, but he could still see more of his reflection than he preferred. His skin was rough and discolored, seemingly stained the same grayish color as the Chicago streetscape. The lower half of his face covered in sporadic patches of hair that his two-year-old disposable razor couldn’t seem to cut. His hair was disheveled and had been cut unevenly with a piece of a broken beer bottle. His hazel eyes looked prematurely aged, the way they sagged down at the corners; his lips were the same. Henry turned away from the mirror, feeling much less composed than when he had entered the room. He looked for a place to set his music.
It had been ages since he’d read from sheet music. He didn’t have a stand to place the music on, nor anything to stick it to the wall, save a piece of chewed gum, once pink but aged into a grayish purple. He resolved to just lay it atop the wobbly dresser of missing drawers. He would have to arch his back uncomfortably in order to read the notes.
Henry removed the bow from his case and coated it with rosin. He drew the bow across the chunk of hard, amber rosin, which he had from his days at the university. He knew despite the disheveled hair of the bow and the warped rosin, he could make his instrument sing; but without rosin, there was no hope. He unpacked his violin and brushed his hand over the back of the instrument. After seeing the newly made instruments, Henry wanted to inspect his violin. He stroked the perfect, natural curves on the scroll and the shoulders of the instrument. He traced the f-holes on either side of the bridge, which somehow managed to support the tension in the strings, despite its brittle frailty. He ran his fingers over strings that were starting to unravel. The imperfection didn’t take away from the beauty. He felt his violin’s injuries, the places the wood had been chipped. He brushed his fingers across the areas where the varnish had worn away into dark roses on the wood.
Henry cradled the violin between his shoulder and chin. He drew his bow across the strings and heard it sing, the mirror of a voice. He turned the tight pegs until the pitch in the air matched the one in his head. He hunched over his music and played the first notes of Tartini’s sonata.
Allegro
The first movement sounded sedate. He played each note with a long bow stroke and moved his hand back and forth with wide vibrato. Carried away with the romanticism of the piece, he slid into the notes as he shifted to the upper register of his instrument. He felt the string under his rough, calloused fingertip and strained to make the sound more prominent. The more he played, the more he felt the raw emotion in the piece. Each note pleading with growing intensity and fading away in tragic relief.
The second movement brought an attack, completely different than the first. The smooth, legato notes of the previous movement gave way to sharp, accented bow strokes. He went from the tinny E string down to the heavy G string and his right hand grew heavier to match the intensity of the notes.
After he played the last note, he became aware of a loud thumping outside his door. “Damn it Henry, it’s been hours! It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake. Keep it down!” John yelled from the hallway.
Henry called out an apology, but John had already stomped out of earshot. Henry reluctantly put his violin away. He knew he should go to sleep himself, he would have to be well rested if he wanted to give a good performance the next day, and he had a hard enough time getting money on his best days. But he couldn’t make his mind stop spiraling. He lay with his eyes closed and replayed the sonata in his head, desperate to know what the rest sounded like. He rose out of the worn bed to consult the sheet music several times until he remembered enough to satisfy him. A few hours later, he fell into a restless sleep.
***
Henry woke up early the next morning, but he didn’t get out of bed. He tried to ignore the lumps and dents in the mattress as he stared at the white popcorn textured ceiling. The paint had glitter mixed into it-- a cheap imitation of the night sky. His thoughts meandered around the room. He should get up. He should go out on the street-- he needed the money. But Tartini’s created his greatest composition in bed, surely that meant something. Henry could lie there for a few more moments, maybe something great would come of it. The sunbeams from his window grew longer and brighter, illuminating the heavy dust motes in the air. The sight made Henry cough.
At midday, he rose at last. After rinsing the sleep from his face in the bathroom sink, he picked up his violin and left the room. As he walked out of the motel, he saw an embarrassed looking man in a suit and a beautiful woman in a green dress with sad eyes exiting the motel. When they reached the street, they went in opposite directions. Henry, not wanting to accompany either of them, crossed the street and made his way in a third direction.
He planted himself next to a gothic bridge and began playing the Sibelius that had brought him so much fortune the previous day. From a technical point of view, Henry played better today than he had before, but the music felt wrong. He played mechanically and he found the melodies cold and dull.
He played the final notes of the concerto and bowed stiffly to the scattered applause. Some dropped a couple bucks in his open case, but the majority turned and started walking away. People often stopped to listen without paying, but today, with his hollow stomach and bored fingers, he got angry.
“That’s it?” Henry yelled, surprising himself. “Do you even know what I just played?” He continued yelling in his head, You should pay fifty dollars for that kind of performance, and you can’t spare a couple bucks? I’m the best Goddamn violinist on the streets of Chicago!
Not surprisingly, the crowd didn’t come back to pay, but rather rushed away more quickly. Out of the corner of his eye, Henry saw a uniformed officer making his way towards the disturbance. Henry immediately put his instrument away and sprinted off through the mass of people; he didn’t have a permit to play on the streets. Most officers overlooked this for talented musicians, but once he became a nuisance, he couldn’t be overlooked.
Luckily, Henry had made a bit of money before the incident. He made his way to the nearest street vendor and bought a hotdog with everything on it. He ate the entire thing in three bites, but the food did nothing to sate his hunger. He approached the vendor again and bought two more. He hesitated for a moment, remembering his debt to John, but Henry’s hunger grew stronger than his conviction. Before long, he ate both hot dogs in a few bites and wanted more. The vendor looked confused as he returned for a third time, and his confusion turned to irritation when Henry revealed his lack of money. The vender turned him away, not even listening to his pleading or his offers to pay more later. Once he realized he wouldn’t get any more food from the man, Henry yelled an insult at the vender and returned to the motel to work on the sonata.
Grave.
“You call that music-- I’m surprised you make any money with that God awful sound! Save it for the streets. If I hear one more note, you’re gone,” John said. He slammed the door and a crack in the wood splintered a bit farther.
Henry couldn’t help but agree with the harsh words. He had been playing the cadenza, the hardest part of the sonata, for hours, and still, the Devil’s Trill eluded him. He only managed a grotesque combination of notes with out of tune double stops. The trill only worsened the effect, like using a bit of lace to cover up a blood stain.
Henry carefully packed up his violin, more out of habit than anything else, and stared at his case. At first he sat on his bed, but the sight of his music on the wobbly dresser mocked him, so he walked out into the motel lobby and sat on a ratty floral couch with questionable stains. He didn’t know what to do. He had given his entire life to music. He never asked for more. He worked at his craft everyday, improving bit by bit. Even when he ran out of money and took up residence in the sketchy motel, he continued working, continued playing his instrument. He’d lived his entire life with one mindset, one reason for living, and all of a sudden he discovered he wasn’t enough; what did that make him?
Several minutes passed before he noticed a woman sitting next to him, the same woman he had seen leaving the motel that morning, the woman in a green dress with sad eyes. He noticed the delicate black lines that drew a pattern over her silk dress. She had short blond hair which curled at the tips, and scarlet lipstick which clung to her lips. She seemed to notice Henry staring, and he looked away.
“I saw you this morning,” she said in a light, airy voice.
“Yeah, I saw you too,” he replied. They sat in an uncomfortable silence for several minutes. “What brings you here this evening?”
Henry regretted the words as soon as they left his lips. She declined to reply and began inspecting her fingernails. He too, looked at her fingernails. His eyes traveled up her arm. He noticed her bare shoulder, curved slightly to the front. Her neck, long and thin, extended forward. Her dress clung to her breasts and gathered beneath them. The silk material fell above her knee, but as she sat with her legs crossed, the dress slid up her leg with every shift of her body. She noticed him staring, scoffed, and turned away. He knew he should look away, but with her backless dress he noticed the curve of her back, so similar to that of a violin. In his mind, he drew the f-holes around her spine and imagined guiding his hand across her skin, feeling for worn off varnish or chips in the wood. His gaze reached up her spine to where her neck met her hair. Her curls imitated the exact shape of a scroll.
In the next instant, man in a suit strode into the room and stood before them. Henry looked away from the girl, but not before the man noticed the subject of his gaze. His eyes clearly warned Henry to clear off, but before he could move the woman rose and began walking towards their room. After a few moments of his scathing glare, the man followed his mistress.
Henry leaned back into the couch and gazed unseeing at the wall. His mind emptied and a certain buzzing filled his ears. He didn’t want to move anymore. He didn’t move, he didn’t see, he didn’t think, he barely breathed. He remained slumped and still against the couch.
He began to see the object of his stare. He saw the off-white wall with grime sticking to the rough texture. He saw his feet in the same brown tennis shoes he had first walked off the college campus in. He observed his hands-- the hands that had played violin for so many hours. He examined his fingertips: the tips of all four fingers on his left hand were calloused from the extended amount of time in contact with the metal strings; the tip of his thumb and the side of his index finger on his right hand were rough from the hours guiding horsehair across the strings. Henry didn’t want these fingers, primed for violin, to go to waste. He didn’t want to lose the music that went from his head to his fingers. He didn’t want to stop playing. But at the moment, he couldn’t make the effort to rise from the couch.
Cadenza
“What are you doing out here?” John yelled, probably angry that Henry was in view for the real guests of the motel.
Henry woke up gasping with his heart beating wildly in his chest. He could still see his dream--the woman in a green dress sitting next to him, playing his sonata. Her sad eyes gazing into him, into the darkest corners of his mind, as she played perfectly. Henry looked out the window. The sky was still dark. He shook his head slightly and felt the last few notes of the cadenza fall away. He stood and walked away, barely hearing the angry exclamations from John behind him.
Henry threw open the door to his room and it slammed against the wall. He ignored the resounding thud and the sound of the crack widening. He knelt down on the floor and undid the latch on his case. He quickly attached the shoulder rest and turned the screw to tighten his bow. He stepped up to the wobbly dresser holding the sheet music and placed the bow halfway between the end of the fingerboard and the bridge.
The sound poured out of him in a frenzied passion. He drew his bow recklessly across the strings. Hairs tore and split, they became wisps of smoke still attached to his bow. He placed his fingers haphazardly across the strings. The notes were technically flawed, but with raw emotion filling his ears, Henry heard only perfection.
He thought of the crowd in front of the bridge. He felt his wrath towards them as if they had just walked away from him. He thought scathingly of thesuccessful musicians with half his talent, half his passion. He lusted over the memory of the green dress sliding up the woman’s leg. He remembered the leaden feeling in his limbs and feeling unable to move or breathe. He gorged himself with the deep sound of the low notes as he pushed still harder into the string. A popping sound interrupted the flow and a whiplike, metal string slashed across Henry’s face. He halted his playing when he saw the droplet of red blood strike the black and white page of his music. Shock caused Henry’s hands to loosen and his violin fell to the ground, scroll first. The neck snapped in two and imitated the sound of the crack in the door.
“What the Hell--” John began to say, standing in the open doorway.
Henry roared in frustration and, without hesitation, he ripped the sheet music from the dresser with one hand and stole the rosin with the other. Then he rushed from the room as John stepped aside, looking fearful. As Henry tore down the hall, a doorway opened, revealing the half dressed man and woman in the lover’s suite. The man poked his head out, presumably to find the source of the commotion. But he, like John, reared back to get out of Henry’s way.
A few moments later, Henry had forgotten them entirely. He sprinted down the dark street. The cold wind bit into his face and tried to steal the music from his hand, but Henry held the flimsy paper tighter and embraced the pain. He hardly knew where he went until he saw the spires and the arches that came to a point.
The combination of the force of his speed and the wind, which had shifted to push him from behind, helped him open the heavy mahogany doors. He passed the old elevator and bounded up the stairs, tripping often and using his hands to push himself up so that he imagined looking like some great beast who couldn’t walk on two legs.
Henry finally stopped sprinting and gripped the rosin tighter in his hand. He pulled his arm back and flung the cake of rosin as hard as he could towards the glass door. They both shattered simultaneously into a thousand pieces, the transparent glass pieces combined with the shards of burnt orange rosin in the air.
Before the glass hit the ground, Henry sprinted through the doorway and received a deep cut from a shard of glass still protruding from the frame. He ignored the added droplets of blood as they dripped onto his music, and he headed straight towards the violins. He picked up the master piece, the violin which had been finished only a few hours earlier.
Then he began the sonata again from the very beginning. He forced his fingers to be calm for the Larghetto Affettuoso, but their tone revealed that he held back a certain violence, some of which he released in the Allegro. He pulled his bow across the strings angrily, impatiently, and he planted his left hand fingers with enough force to make them speak without the bow. He had to pull back for the Grave. He held his breath and let the sorrow of defeat fill his mind, the sound of hidden violence yet more intense. He let the last note ring in the air for tense seconds. Then, with a sharp retake of his bow, he attacked the Cadenza. His fingers flew across the strings bringing forth more notes than could be possible for one violin. An entire orchestra spilled forth from his instrument. He bowed with more force, trilled with more fury, and his string crossings became more hectic. The feeling of running at a dead sprint, the feeling of screaming. He felt every instrument in the room, the orchestra, enter with him for the Adagio. He reached the final notes of the piece and played with longer, heavier bows than physics would allow. Upon the release, Henry heard the strings of the other instruments in the shop still reverberating with sympathetic vibrations. It was over in an instant, and the silence sounded broken in Henry’s ears.