The violinist..

She had left the train with sleepy eyes.
While walking along the platform carrying her two bags, she was thinking and wondering how would that city would look like … she had heard that it was easy there to obtain some euro, but she wasn’t sure...
So, she set out to the main street, full of tourists and residents....

While walking along , she was watching the pavement, whose tiles formed crazy waves, and the buildings, impossibly strange and fabulous… what a vast difference this was compared with those she had visited after leaving her far hometown, some years ago…

At once, she realized that she would not earn much money in that street, because there was a lot doing the same as she did. But she went on walking. Few people paid attention to her worn out trousers, boots, and her hair, dirtily punk.

By chance, she looked at her left and saw a square not so far. When she arrived there, she discovered a beautiful space surrounded by buildings, plenty of cafes with people seated at their tables, sharing the sky and that moon between the palms growing at that incredible place. She decided to try there…
At a side of the square, there was a row of people waiting to enter who knows where, so she thought : maybe I had better stay there. She stopped nearby, left one of her bags on the floor, opened the other, and took out her old, out-of-tune violin.

She knew well that the coins she got from people were more for pity, than for her art. However, she did not care. For a longtime now, there were few things she cared about. She was only interested to eat that day… hunger was strong.
When she was about to begin playing, she noticed a little girl standing in the front row of the people watching her. And her soul recognised with surprise that the kid had the same glance that she once had as a young child. Inquisitive, impish, plenty of desire to discover the world, the universe… a glance thirsty of life…

She asked herself when had she lost that glance… she asked herself why…

However, closing her eyes as she always did when playing, she began…
The notes that her fingers whispered, and the music that her heart bestrewed to pervade that square, lasted for many minutes… it was like all those years of containment had been finally liberated…. all that energy, all that eagerness to drink life until the last drop had appeared again.
She played and played, without realizing that people watching and listening all around her had silenced, and without noticing that all at the coffees’ tables had stopped to talk, at that Plaza Reial at Barcelona…
She played as if the night would never be finished, and as if that moon smiling among the palms would be enjoying that moment… she played for lost joys and for the inexhaustible pains, for the remembrance of a laugh and the taste of a chat…
Her fingers, suddenly, stopped. She came back to reality and opened her eyes hoping this time to find more coins in her cap lying on the ground in front of her.
But what she found, in addition to many, many coins, was people with teary eyes. People had not even been able to applaud because it seemed that their emotion had overcome their ability to react…

In front of them, was that little girl. Watching her with a smile, saying in silence that dreams and hopes are always there, within us… and that never, ever, must we confine them.

.