Contrast is Everything

There was a young man I knew, before my life had the color it has now: he was what one might call a madman, the strange thing being that features gave the appearance of the everyday: clean-shaven, healthy skin, piercing blue eyes; but his smile –- ah, his smile was sheer savagery, and I was among his victims.

His apparent task in life was to run across anyone he found while telling them, with an apocalyptic insanity, lips doused with an almost hyperkinetic blur, “contrast is everything!” incessantly, as if his single mission in life was to drive to the ground anyone he saw with these same stubborn words –- never a change, never a break, always the same; we were flogged with it. He would wander the streets, systematically, over and over, like an echo granted flesh, seeking people he had seen the day before, his insistence carrying the shadow of a stalker, and never without –- mark this –- his beloved saxophone –- a tenor saxophone: a worn-down, neglected, ragamuffin instrument, without a single patch of sheen, littered with rust, long since dropped by the warm hands of beauty. You would never see him without it.

Our group was composed of five or six. We met on a somewhat-grassy portion of land, a sort of meeting-ground between our respective apartments, amidst other groups: men without need to mention, who preferred their covert identities. We were nothing more than common men striving towards the medians or our lives; we knew what it was to settle down; we knew, yes, mediocrity; we knew the same. All we wanted in life was to enjoy the dying day under the blushing rays of the sun at the last patch of land this enormous city seemed close to stealing from us. But him – he would walk up to our group at approximately six o’clock every single day for over a week, cut in his worn-out maxim during our conversations, and always –- always! –- paint his same tiring phrase with a horrendous attempt at improvisation on that fucking little saxophone. The noise was always enough to unravel my nerves, freeze my frame with contempt. My response was always an endless flinch. Imagine a duck on a loquacious drinking-binge. You have it.

And the scene never changed: after playing a few pseudo-notes in various places, the walls bleeding in pain, the very oxygen of the place on the verge of splitting town, the whole performance each time lasting no more than two minutes, he would break out with “contrast is everything!” spoken with what seemed like such a careless seriousness, almost as if he was mocking us for being ignorant of this strange idea he preached. Again, again, again, inexorably – a tenth ring for Dante were eternity ever added –- “contrast is everything! Contrast is everything! Everything!” He abused his instrument; he abused us. A sparkling smartass in our clique joked how both he and the saxophone needed a hundred hours of psychotherapy. God knows we tried to put up with him; and God knows we lost.

Patience was worn. One day he walked up to our particular group –- I’m sure he planned this –- and pulled out the same farce as before. Bad notes, bad notes, “contrast is everything!” bad notes, bad notes, an nausea-inspiring run down a chromatic scale, and, always: “contrast is everything!”. The crowd, our group included, was by now ready to lynch him. A man whose sufferings gave the appearance of an older age than he actually was, whose face some said was worn with unnamable suffering, broke out in a not-quite-trot, stopping three feet before him, screaming the words “goddamnit man! What the hell are you talking about?” staring down the madman-saxophonist with eyes gasping for understanding. The he was me.

The savage was unswayable: he made a break for a little free safety by walking a few feet away, and while he was escaping, he continued this ridiculous absurdity. Ruffling my hair in despair, oscillating looks between him and the other men there, I wanted to tear him to pieces. I felt myself magnetized towards him; clawing involuntary in his direction, he flew away: he leaped onto some unimportant steps, and with his new altitude, broke into the strangest repose. For five seconds he stared us down, smiled, closed his eyes (which he had never done before), and placed his lips again to the mouthpiece. I flinched in advance.

Superfluously. Starting on a high voluptuous D, he slipped his way down his own little scale with a deftness and seduction that I had never heard before, tone tapering with an immaculate vibrato, and more, more, more. The emanations that flowed from that bedraggled instrument I could not believe I was hearing. Coltrane had no touch on him. It was the most remarkable piece of music I had ever heard, and played with such passion! It pierced my heart, and left me in a convulsion of shivers, a jangling mass of nerves. The feeling wasn’t that different from falling in love, and exactly like it I had to catch my breath again.

Gazing at him, my shock freely showing, I finally looked back at the rest of my group: everyone else was the same; a few people one could easily assume were dead –- the animation was so long forgotten in their transfixed eyes. One man had this moment forever symbolized by the burn-hole in his spotted gray shirt, the helpless culprit the equally shocked cigarette that dropped from his gape-jawed mouth and burned until he burned. It was as if some strange and fantastic deity was translated into music, and each man here applauded with his own unique silence, his own astonished face.

After he finished this solo, so caught up in himself in performing it, he opened his eyes to the crowd now ready to adore him –- this crowd, just now planning a murder; this crowd, led by my very self in leading him to the gallows -–, and, with the strangest look, something of a mixture of gentleness and mischievousness, his eyes glowing lampposts that penetrated the fog of our incredulity, he said in a half-whisper, half-reproach, half-warning, like the noble Christ resting his Beatitudes on the consenting crowd below him:

“Contrast is everything.” He walked from the place with a look of satisfaction, a sort of affectionate laughter in his eyes, leaving footsteps of eternity in his place, and passed right by me, just after softly grazing his burning fingers to my shivering elbow, a frozen mystique sweet-set in his radiant blue eyes. Beauty like that deserves laughter, and laugh I did. I laughed until my eyes leaked. That day his madness became mine.

And we never saw him again. He apparently knew his own gospel.