“There is only one question I can ask you, Adeline. There is only one answer I’ll accept, so what will it be?”

“No.”

It was later that night that Gustavo truly felt what pain meant in his lonely Parisian apartment. The walls with paint peeling off the walls and the pain seeping from his skin. The apartment was such a place of beauty, it had the authentic Parisian feel. An apartment that’s almost self-aware of it’s decay and instead of rushing to fix and change it, the apartment was slowing down. Maybe even sitting and grabbing a small glass of succulent Chateau d’Yquem. Gustavo, himself, opened that fine vintage and sipped in the darkness of his salon. The dark enveloped him almost to the point where he was simmering in his own despair. Laying slumped in his chair, he promised himself something. Adeline would pay for this. He walked over to his bedroom and grabbed a notebook, in only the light of his paraffin lamp, he wrote. He wrote until his hands began to cramp, till his mind wandered into the empty and never ending dunes of his imagination. Until, the very fabric of time slowed and somehow, the story and him became one. Binded only to reality by a single thread of his physical form, his mind wandered. Wandered to places, even he could confirm he never knew he knew.

Alas, the biting sting of the sun hit his face, awakening him from his subconscious slumber, he woke like a new man. He cocked his hat as he pleased, so to speak. He had been awakened. As his father would say Nothing like a lover to correct your path. He entered the halls where he had often find his soul. His concert hall, his Shangri-La. The place where nirvana came to him.The faded black of his concert hall was something that stirred him. He brought out his leather notebook and cracked his knuckles. He picked his violin and started a melody. People often asked how he became such a successful conductor despite the fact he never learned how to read or write music, his answer often made people skeptical, confused and even angry. He started (the recipe for his success was such popular query that he developed a brief but very descriptive answer for it) by telling people when he first heard music.

“In Toscana, I was from the small city of Grosseto, and it was completely shattered after the war. Buildings that stood tall since the days of Dante brought down by one man fooled by another to shoot down his brothers and sisters. Grosseto needed something to remind it’s people that life was not just bullets and rations. My parents opened our attic, and brought out two cases. They refused to tell me what they were until the entire city (which had only around 1000 people) met up in the “sala di concerti”. So the day passed, we met in the “sala di concerti”, and my parents opened their cases. My mother opened her case and brought out a velvet stool and sat at the piano and my father had a violin.”

What he describes next is what really confuses, angers or frustrates people. He describes what happened after his parents struck the first notes of their piece, instead of hearing their beautiful rendition of Scarlatti, he saw colours. Not from their surroundings but rather their instruments. Subtle shades of green coming from out from the beautiful strokes of the violin, shades of purple and blue coming from the pounding ivory keys. Gustavo saw his parents creating this beautiful kaliedescope of artistic expression. Passionately struck, he ran to his parents and picked up a violin and created these colours. First, the shades were wrong but soon enough he struck the perfect colour.