Please print off the passage below.
But to be in Seville without a guitar is like being on ice without skates. So every morning, while Kati went dancing with h Maestro
Realito, I took lessons on the
instrument in my room.
My instructor, one of Seville’s most
respected professors of the guitar, was a small
sad man, exquisitely polite and
patient, poorly but neatly dressed, and addicted to bow ties made of wallpaper. Each day
at the stroke of ten, he knocked
softly at my door and entered on tiptoe, as though into a sick room, carrying his guitar case like a doctor’s bag.
“ How are
we today?” he would ask sympathetically,
“ and how do we proceed?”
Silently, he would place two chairs opposite each other, put me in the one
facing the light, sit himself in the other, then ponder me long and sadly while
I played. Infinite compassion, as from one who
has seen much suffering , possessed his face while he
listened. An expression of one who, forced to
inhabit a solitary peak of perfection,
has nowhere to look but downwards at the waste of a fumbling world.
After an
hour’s examination, during which he
tested all my faulty coordinations, he would
hand me a page of exercises and bid me take them twice a day. Then, with a
little bow, his chin resting mournfully
upon his paper tie, he would leave me
to visit his next patient.
Sometimes -
but very occasionally - he would relax at the end of the lesson, empty his pockets of tobacco dust, roll
himself a cigarette, smile, take up
his guitar and play it to me for
an hour. Then his eyes would turn inward
and disappear into the echoing chambers
of his mind, while his long white fingers moved over the strings with the soft delicacy of the blind, lost in a dream
of melody and invention. And faced with
the beauty of his technique , the
complex harmonies , the ease and grace ,
the supreme mastery of tone and feeling, I would feel like one of the lesser
apes who, shuffling on his knuckles through the sombre marshes , suddenly catches sight of homo sapiens,
upright on a hill, his gold head raised
to the sky.
Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie
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