Piano Man

Piano Man

While reading the latest reports re the current violent crisis in Uzbekistan, I came across this story about a man in his twenties who was found wandering aimlessly by the sea on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, dressed in a black suit carrying music sheets in a plastic folder. Refusing to talk, the young man was taken to a hospital where by chance it was discovered that the man could or would only reach out by playing melancholic tunes on the piano. No one knows, yet, who this man is and where he came from, let alone what his story is, but personnel at the psychiatric unit where he has been confined believe that something alarming must have happened to the guy, nicknamed Piano Man, causing him an amnesiac shock.

The story of Piano Man would provide a perfect plot for Oliver Friggieri, whose Stejjer għal Qabel Jidlam is full of melancholic characters with heart breaking life histories. I remember reading these tear jerking stories when they were serialised in Sagħtar back in the 1970s. I mean Piano Man's story does lend itself to poetry and it could very easily be romanticised in books or film. It did remind me of certain Chaplin films bar their comic reliefs.

Piano Man reminded me also of a man I had met in a Naples asylum where I was doing voluntary work when I was seventeen. In a large building run by the Sisters of Charity in Vicolo dei Panettieri (at the very heart of Naples's detestable centre) there lived a considerable number of mentally and physically sick homeless people: schizophrenics, junkies, ex-prostitutes with late stage syphilis, and other patients with similar cases. One of the inmates was a huge unkempt man who though in his late thirties looked more like a sexagenarian. The guy never spoke but sniggered all the time. All he did was smoke cheap cigarettes he would get from fellow inmates, and help the nuns carry the huge pots of soup to the refectory. I got to know his story through one of the nuns' helpers. The big guy had once been a concert violinist, teaching at some conservatory in Italy. He fell in love with a female student who once alleged the violinist had sexually harassed her, thus denting his reputation. And that was the end of the virtuoso. During my stay at the asylum I often wondered how the big guy would have reacted had anyone played the violin to him.

The story of Piano Man led my mind to rejuvenate old memories of those 'ugly people' I had come across in that asylum in Naples. I'd like to recount one final story of a man I had also met at this asylum. A university graduate was employed as a librarian. He simply loved books. Lacking a social life he immersed himself into reading, and once he decided to read all the books collected in the library where he worked. He later fell in love and married a physically and slightly mentally handicapped girl whose parents had died and had no siblings. They lived together for a number of years but their neighbours used to make fun of them until the librarian could not take it anymore and lost all contact with the real world. When I met him at the asylum he used to spend his days in the yard wittingly reciting by heart Dante's Inferno.