Manifesting
In the months before my fiftieth birthday, I was given the dream again, and again and again. I believe I started to have the dream before Ronald arrived, having left Kosovo with its war and aftermath and driven slowly through Macedonia, Greece and Italy and back to Thonon-les-Bains on Lac Leman. I know I had it again when he was back and beside me when I woke up. I shared it with him.
It was autumn 2000 and we had been together for 18 years. Well, not in the same place at the same time but we had been ‘in relationship’ with a good sense of each other’s priorities. Ronald was a good listener. He listened carefully and intently, and he respected dreams, often fascinated and awed by his own – remembered and reflected on.
Quietly: ‘You need a piano?’ I nodded. ‘You haven’t really played during the eighteen years I have known you…’ This was true. In 1988, depressed, I had felt a deep need to reconnect with my music, and my mother packed up my grandmother’s 1901 Bechstein piano and shipped it from Port Elizabeth to her beloved desperate daughter in Nyon, Switzerland. But by 1989 I was swept up with my work in Tanzania and merely caressed the piano between missions…. until 1994. And in 1995 the piano made another outrageous ocean crossing back to Cape Town.
‘Yes, Ronald. I do need a piano’. He looked around our third floor walk-up loft apartment. His eyes showed concern. Not much wall space to fit a piano against, and he suggested a digital keyboard upstairs in the kitchen/dining area. ‘No, it’s a real piano. A grand piano’. So, I proceeded to map out exactly where my future piano would be, sticking down masking tape in a perfect outline. And there it was, flat on the floor: a 1.8 meter long grand piano. No more debate. Life could continue. Ronald’s office area intact, we could get to cupboards, bookshelves and our desks. It would be fine. It just needed to manifest.
It was now November 2000, and the fog lay thickly on the lake. Ronald was once again based somewhere else – Brussels – and I had started dreaming my piano. The message had gone out to the universe: BECHSTEIN, GRAND, OLD! The masking tape outline remained in place for a total of three months. I took to walking around it, not over it or ‘bumping into’ it. It began to assume volume and became almost solid. I could almost feel its presence and placed a piano stool in the correct place – my hands poised in mid-air – eyes closed, alone. In Silence!
I realise now that the act of visualising a desired outcome in as much detail as possible is key to its manifestation – and, the piano found me the week before my fiftieth birthday through a series of serendipitous happenings.
***
On Christmas Eve 2000, my close friend Beth’s husband died after a long struggle. He had returned from hospital and they shared their final family meal at home. A fortnight later I went up to be with her in Leysin, the mountain village where she lived.
That week I had put out the word of my intention to find a Bechstein, asking my friend Iris and her father, a collector of old pianos and oriental carpets, to keep eyes and ears open in Geneva. I had also scheduled a bodywork treatment session with Iris, which now coincided with my being in Leysin. So, I called her to reschedule.
Well. Iris was breathless. She had been calling me and leaving messages in Thonon. It was urgent. A 1923 Bechstein grand was to be advertised the next morning in Geneva. A family friend, widowed. Her husband had owned and played the piano for twenty-eight years. Madame Pahud was willing to offer me a preferential price as a friend of Iris’s. But I needed to call immediately! It was already after 9pm and a Wednesday.
I called in French. I was also breathless. And when I speak French I know that I sound young… and breathless. It was arranged. We would need to get to Geneva the next morning as early as possible, as madame would be fielding responses to the advert.
Beth, now a partner in this unfolding and exciting drama, drove the two hours on the autoroute and we were there soon after ten. We climbed the stairs to the first floor flat where a huge black piano dominated the study.
And yes, I touched it, used the pedal and saw the keyboard mechanism shift in one movement to the left. It just moved! I was alarmed: was the piano OK? I called Iris’s brother, a jazz musician, and could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Have you never played a grand piano?’ No, never ( except for one time in London… but that was in desperation… and I wasn’t aware of the piano). Well, this was a wonderful piano and if he had more space, he would have snapped it up. So…
I sat back and caressed the keys. There were marks on the panel below the letters Bechstein written in gold, above the actual notes, where monsieur Pahud’s fingernails must have tapped repeatedly and worn away the varnish. He clearly played often and in the middle register.
I didn’t make much sound. Madame Pahud might have been surprised – but didn’t show it– that I was taking this magnificent piano without putting it through any paces. But I knew it felt right. And, besides, apart from a few fragments which gave me a sense of the beautiful resonance and vibration, I didn’t have much else to offer.
It was decided. I was exhuberant as we drove back to Leysin. We might have celebrated with a lunch on the way home. I don’t recall, but that would have been our style. Ronald was returning the next afternoon from Brussels, coming home for the weekend. Then he would come back again in a fortnight for my fiftieth birthday. I had found my piano, or it had found me, in time for this milestone.
***
From the airport, I drove Ronald straight to Madame Pahud in Geneva. We had a wad of large notes in an envelope, and I handed this over before he could voice what showed in his facial expression.
‘How on earth is this piano going to get into our apartment?’
We lived in Thonon-les-Bains, on the French side of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) looking across the lake to Switzerland. The piano’s new home was in a small medieval hamlet at the port, with an eleventh century castle nearby and a funicular linking the port with the little town on the hill above. Rue du Funiculaire is the address, but ‘ruelle’ would have been more accurate as it is an extremely narrow and steep, one-way access road with building fronts opening directly onto the road.
So how the piano was going to get into our apartment was a very good question since we lived in a three-hundred-year-old building, on the third floor. Stone stairs rose between the floors without mid-way landings and with a few stairs curving at top and bottom of each floor. Doorways to two apartments led off the landing on each of the first and second floors. Then there was the entrance to our apartment loft at the top. There was no alternative except for getting the piano up the stairwell.
***
Several days later I met the piano movers at the border with Switzerland to get papers stamped for importing my piano into France. I led the twenty kilometres or so, glancing in my rearview mirror. I had alerted the neighbours, and there were no cars parked against the facades of the old buildings where our small French cars were usually nestled at night. The access road was just wide enough to reverse the small truck up as far as the front door to the threehundred-year-old building where we lived.
I entered our building and stared up the stairwell, my heart racing. How on earth was this going to happen? I climbed the stairs, deliberately and very consciously. Conscious that soon there would be sweating and grunting and swearing in French. The sounds of supreme effort would echo in this tall stairwell and enter into each apartment. I knocked on the two doors on each floor to announce the piano’s imminent arrival.
In order to manouvre the piano around the corners and up the flights of stairs, at least part of its body needed to cross the threshold and enter each apartment. What an image: this great black beast establishing its territory greeting each neighbour before finally crossing the threshold into my life! It entered and was positioned perfectly over the masking tape, which I peeled off with due ceremony. The piano stood proudly. There! Present! Perfect!
I breathed out at last, looking at the three muscled men who had performed this miraculous ascension. ‘If this piano was one centimeter longer?’ I enquired quietly. The leader of the team shook his head emphatically. JAMAIS! JAMAIS! JAMAIS!
‘This will NEVER go DOWN those stairs again. EVER!’
One week later I crossed another threshold myself – turning fifty.
***