A passage from the book I'm reading now.
"I don't want to die without trying everything, at least once," she whispered to Cormac one night. "I don't know anything about the soul, but I want to know everything about flesh. Everything that I can possibly know. To see it. To feel it. To do it. For I could die tomorrow."
So Cormac realized that he was also living with a woman who knew something about mortality. In a room on the top floor of a building on Duane Street. The palace of water and flesh and music.
One Tuesday morning, she moved a new piano into the suite, and across the long evenings, while the countess mingled with the customers, flirting, teasing, confiding, Cormac played. He learned to read music without much of a struggle; it was, as he'd thought, another language, and if he could think in Yoruba and Irish, if he could teach himself French, if he could decode Latin, then these notations, which were a kind of drawing too, did not intimidate him. Execution was another matter. Sometimes his hands felt encased in wool. He hit the wrong keys, smashed chords, lost the tempo. And started over.
On some solitary nights, he ignored the music sheets and allowed his hands to drift, to caress each key, to discover music he had never heard and could not imagine. It was as if he was bringing forth some hidden spirit from the secret caves within the piano, revealing its desperate yearning for pleasure. He could feel Ireland in the music. And Africa. And the ocean sea.
On other nights, he felt music as a form of landscape, with rolling hills and a placid river and trees with rustling leaves. He could feel it in his painter's hands, which were not yet the hands of a musician. The terrain was not made of earth, or paint, but sound. He would try to find paths through the hills of sound, he would try to find a way to the river. He always failed. His hands were too crude. The paths were not marked. Then he would try again. He did not feel frustrated. Frustration, after all, was an impatience with the ticking of clocks. He had all the time in the world.
On some nights in the early spring, after their bath, the countess would sit naked at the piano, commanding him to lie on the bed. Teaching him had brought back the passion she felt, long ago, for music. Or so she said. A passion she'd erased through an act of will. Now it rose from her again, like a ghost. Here is Vivaldi, she said. Here is Scarlatti. Here is something without a composer. Here is France. Here is Haiti. She would play then as if the notes were licking his flesh and entering his body. The music of such nights always made him hard.