Now, finally, everything is white.
The man is leaning his shoulders against the wall of a small, rectangular room. He is sitting on the floor, holding his bent knees and watching the movement of his toes in white cotton socks. He is wearing a jacket and trousers of rough white cotton, as white as the walls that close him in. There is a metal bed against the wall in front of him, screwed to the floor. It, too, is white.
There are no sheets, but the mattress and pillow are white. There is a white light coming from the ceiling, protected by a heavy grating, hastily painted white: the source of the blinding brightness in the room.
The light never goes out.
He slowly raises his head. His green eyes look carelessly at the tiny window, placed so high that it is unreachable. It is the only marker for the passage of time. Light and dark. White and black. Day and night. He doesn’t know why, but he can never see the blue of the sky.
His solitude is not a burden. Actually, he is irritated by every intrusion from outside. Every once in a while, a slot opens in the bottom of the door and a tray with plastic bowls slides inside. The plastic is white and the food always tastes the same. There is no cutlery. He eats with his fingers and returns the tray when the slot opens. In exchange, he receives a white, damp cloth to clean his hands. He must return it immediately.
Every so often, a voice tells him to stand in the middle of the room with his arms out. They check his movements from a spy hole in the middle of the door. When they see that he is in the right position, the door opens and several men come in. They put his arms in a straitjacket and tie it behind his back. He smiles each time they put it on him.
He feels that the powerful men in green are afraid of him and try as hard as they can to avoid his gaze. He can almost smell their fear. Still, they should know that his time of struggle is over. He has said it over and over again to the man with the glasses in the room where they take him. The man who wants to speak, to know, to understand.
He has also told him over and over that there is nothing to understand. There is only acceptance of what happens and what will continue to happen, just as he accepts being enclosed with all that white until he becomes one with it.
No, his solitude is no burden.
The only thing he misses is music.
He knows they won’t let him have any, so sometimes he closes his eyes and imagines it. He has played so much and listened to so much and breathed so much that if he looks for it, he finds it intact, exactly the same as the moment when it entered him. He is no longer interested in memories, the ones made of images and words – faded colours and hoarse sounds corrupted by the search for meaning. In his prison, the only use of memory is to locate the hidden treasure of all the music he possesses. It is the only legacy left by the man who once claimed the right to be called Father, before he decided that he was no longer that man’s son and took away that right along with his life.
If he concentrates, he can hear the music as well as if an agile hand were winding its way down the neck of an electric guitar right in front of him, a furious solo running along a scale that turns and travels higher and higher and never ends.
He can hear brushes grazing across the drums or damp, hot breath fighting its way through the tortuous funnel of a saxophone, becoming the voice of human melancholy, the sharp pain of regret for something wonderful that has crumbled in our hands, corroded with time.
He can find himself in the middle of a string section and watch the light, rapid movement of the first violinist’s bow, or slip unnoticed between the sinuous flourishes of an oboe, or stop to observe the well-trimmed nails of the fingers that fly nervously over the harp strings like wild animals behind the bars of a cage.
He can turn the music on or off whenever he wants. And like all imaginary things, it is perfect. He has everything he needs inside him: all his past, all his present, and all his future.
Music is more than enough to defeat the solitude. Music is the only promise kept, the only bet won. He told someone once that music is everything, the beginning and the end of the journey, and the journey itself. They listened to him, but they didn’t believe him. But what can you expect from someone who plays music and hears music but doesn’t breathe it?
No, he has no fear of solitude.
Then again, he is not alone. Never, not even now.
No one has ever understood and perhaps no one ever will. That is why they always look so far away for what is right before their eyes, like they will always do. That is why he was able to hide for so long amid all those hurried glances, the way black can hide amid other colours. None of them could accept the blinding whiteness of a room like that without screaming.
He doesn’t need to scream. He doesn’t even need to speak.
He leans his head against the wall and closes his eyes, removing them only for an instant from the brightness of that room, not because he fears it but because he respects it.
He smiles as the voice reaches him inside his head, loud and clear.
Are you there, Vibo?