This is a letter to my mother.
I apologize.
I can't take it anymore. I'm sorry, Mother, but I see no hope of ever finding something as beautiful as that again.
Ever since I heard that simple, yet lovely, street artist sing that…
Her music was so beautiful… so perfect and melancholic, as if it had been written directly by a god. I feel as though I don't deserve to live in a world where something so divine can exist.
I don't know who or what she is, but I feel she cannot be human. No man or woman could produce something so perfect.
Everything I do is bad, Mother. You are awful, Helena is terrible, my job is unbearable, I am wretched, everything is awful, except for her and her music. We do not deserve to hear her, we do not deserve to occupy the same space she does. All we have left is to die and, at the very least, leave more room for her to exist.
Since that day, everything has lost its color. The streets look like poorly painted scenery, people speak, but their voices sound hollow, weightless. Even my own memories seem false, as if I had lived a borrowed life that has now been taken back from me. It is cruel to admit this, but it is the truth. That music revealed something that should never have been revealed, and now living with that knowledge hurts more than any death ever could.
Before I heard her, my life was good. Not perfect. Hard, as it has always been, but good. I had Helena, whom I love dearly. I had routine, I had fatigue, I had days that were all the same. None of that bothered me.
That day, however, as I crossed the park on my way home, something was wrong. I walked through there every day, always seeing the same scenes. The familiar stench of garbage and tobacco, old men playing chess, drinking cheap beer and throwing indecent looks at women passing by, dogs fighting over territory.
None of that was there, Mother.
The smell seemed to vanish before such divinity. The stupid drunks gathered to listen to her. The dogs lay down beside her as if they were puppies near their mothers.
From afar, I could hear an exceptional melody, far beyond anything I had ever heard, and I have heard many above-average singers in person. You know Helena is very devoted to music.
I didn't even notice it, but I was already standing shoulder to shoulder with those filthy drunks and mangy dogs, listening to the gracious young woman.
I cannot explain it, but I can't remember her face. I only know she was young, perhaps around twenty-five, and probably very beautiful. Yet her face seems to have been erased from my memory. Perhaps because the music was so absurdly perfect that my mind could not record anything else.
The moment I heard that lovely artist draw such notes from her fiddle, I simply froze; I could hardly hear the music with my ears. It was as though it entered not through my ears, but straight into my soul…
That music seeped into my soul and erased everything imperfect; every stain in it was wiped away, leaving only perfection.
But we are human, Mother, and humans have nothing but imperfection. Nothing in us is perfect, so nothing remained in me, as if everything in me had been erased or sucked away by some ancient sorcery into an abyss of human curses.
As I listened, I felt the people around me felt the same. One of those miserable drunks fell to the ground in tears, hurling curses at himself and exalting the brilliant young woman:
"Shame upon me and blessings upon the young lady. Touch my heart with your music and take my life for yourself."
Something unexpected happened then, Mother. That same drunk pulled a stiletto from his pocket and slit his own throat.
In truth, I didn't even show any reaction at that moment. I was completely immersed in those divinely played notes of the goddess of music.
The only thing I felt in that moment was envy… yes, Mother, I am truly like my father.
But I am not as despicable as he was. I envied that man because I wanted to have discovered before he did how to thank that young woman.
I wanted not to have hesitated as he did. I wanted to give my life to her first.
I didn't even notice when the music ceased and the young woman vanished, as if she had been snatched from the world without leaving a trace.
Sometimes I wonder whether it was all my imagination. But I would have had to drink as much as, or more than, Ismael to hallucinate like that, and no one drinks more than he does, hehe…
When the music ended, I immediately felt something was wrong. Everything seemed displaced. The colors, the sounds, the people. Everything, absolutely everything, was ugly, crooked, out of place, like a poorly assembled set after the true spectacle has ended.
When I got home, I found Helena listening to her favorite singer, singing along at the top of her lungs, as if nothing had happened in the world.
That filled me with rage.
That music was terrible. Simply horrible. So bad my ears ached, as if needles were being pushed into them. I would rather puncture my own eardrums than endure one more second of that filthy thing. With all the reason in the world, I asked her to turn it off.
She didn't hear me at first. When she finally noticed, she only lowered the volume.
In that instant, my rage turned into something worse. Denser. Hotter. I confess, Mother, I could have acted differently. But I didn't.
I grabbed the speaker and hurled it with all my strength onto the floor. The device shattered into a heap of useless fragments. Helena's first reaction was shock. Then she screamed with all the strength in her lungs:
"What the fuck is this?!"
We fought badly. She said I had no right to do that, and perhaps she was right. But how could I stand still and allow that atrocity to profane the silence after what I had heard? After perfection, Mother, every human sound is an offense.
After all that, she left the house, took some clothes, and said she would sleep at a friend's place. Today makes two days since I last spoke to her; I think she is even angrier because I haven't spoken to her.
It's fine, better this way… I would feel guilty doing what I am about to do if things were all right between her and me.
And now here I am, writing this letter, Mother.
My final mark upon this world. I decided to write this before surrendering myself to Her, because I do not want you to think I did something so terrible for some trivial reason.
What I am about to do is for a greater good, to free my soul from such a terrible world and give my life to that woman.
Even so, I am sorry, Mother.
Sorry for not being able to show her to you or to Helena.
Signed,
Afonso Filomeno