🎼 Ficción: «Carta de Edubardo Martínez a su madre» (ESP/ENG)

Dear Mom:

Do you remember that summer you bought me the piano? I was eight years old and I cried with happiness. You cried too when you first heard the Moonlight Sonata that I practiced so much. You believed in me like you'll never believe in anything again.

I believed too.

I discovered Glenn Gould late, at nineteen. It was as if a god had decided to show me my own limitations with a flashlight. His fingers didn't just press the keys: they inhabited them like someone who inhabits a house they've known since before they were born. I listened to his 1955 Goldberg Variations and knew, with absolute, cold certainty, that never, not in a thousand years of obsession or monastic discipline, would I achieve that clarity. And it wasn't envy, Mother. It was the lucidity of staring into an abyss and understanding that the leap is impossible. That it always was.

I left the conservatory. I left the scores. I even left the silence between the notes, because even that silence within me was mediocre, impure, full of doubt.

You called me, worried. I lied: I said I was tired, that I needed time. But time didn't heal anything. It only taught me to listen to Gould in every damned recording, to hate my clumsy hands, my mistakes, my uneven breathing when I tried to follow him during the fortissimos.

Inevitably, I gave up. It wasn't a warrior's rest, Mother, it was a dirty, cowardly surrender. I stopped bathing, stopped eating, stopped distinguishing day from night. The piano gathered dust. And in that inertia, I found something worse than sadness: the cowardly peace of not trying anymore. The peace of those who let themselves die like tiny particles pushed by the wind.

But last night everything changed. I went downstairs to the living room. I opened the keyboard lid. I played three chords. They sounded like the mournful heartbeats of a wounded animal. And then I understood that I wasn't even good enough to fail with dignity. Gould had died at fifty with his legend intact. I, at twenty-seven, was already a ghost.

Mom, forgive me for what I'm about to do, for making you believe that one day I would play for you in a theater with beautiful seats. I only wanted to be great. But the world only has one Glenn Gould, and the rest of us learn to live as best we can.

When you read this, I will have tuned the piano for the last time. With the final silence.

Take care of the roses in the garden. You always loved them so much.

With all the love I never knew how to express,

Your son, Edubardo.

_{(Google Translation)}

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