El Chelista de Sarajevo

Varias personas estaban haciendo fila para poder recibir o comprar algo de Pan, no eran asesinos, ladrones o militares, sino ciudadanos comunes y corrientes de Sarajevo. Pero en una ciudad en guerra nadie puede saber que le espera en el instante de vida siguiente.

Después de que cayó El proyectil 22 personas murieron. Las únicas armas que tenía Vedran Smailović, primer chelo de la Orquesta de la Opera de Sarajevo, para combatir toda esa locura eran la música y su instrumento. Por eso decidió ponerse su esmoquin y salir a tocar el Adagio de Albinoni, pieza descubierta en Dresden Alemania. Tocaría 22 días seguidos siempre a la misma hora  en el lugar que cayó el proyectil. Lo haría para honrar a cada una de las personas que perecieron, y lo haría en medio de la guerra con la posibilidad de que los salvajes que tenían sitiada la ciudad podrían silenciarlo en cualquier momento.

Conocí esta historia leyendo un blog hace un par de meses y me atrapó al instante, después me enteré que había un libro donde se narra la misma, desde las experiencias de tres personajes que intentaban sobrevivir en la ciudad: Dragan, Arrow y Kenan.

Descargo de responsabilidad: Las notas que está a punto de leer fueron tomadas de libro "El chelista de Sarajevo" de Steven Galloway y no pretendo tomar ninguna como crédito personal o obtener algún beneficio económico:

• He made the idea of music an actuality. When he stepped on stage in his tuxedo he was transformed into an instrument of deliverance.

• He’ll play Albinoni’s Adagio. He’ll do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed. Or at least he’ll try. He won’t be sure he will survive. He won’t be sure he has enough Adagios left.

• She simply send the bullet where she knows it needs to go. She has trouble understanding why other snipers can’t do this.

• It’s a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won’t last forever.

• Is she could choose, she wouldn’t believe in it either. But she knows it isn’t up to her. You don’t choose what to believe. Belief chooses you

• It’s possible, even likely, that they view this as some sort of game. Boys throwing bombs instead of balls.

• She knows as well as he that there’s no such thing as careful, that the men on the hills can kill anyone, anywhere, any time they like, and that luck or fate or whatever it is that decides who lives and who doesn’t has not, in the past, favored those who act in a way that could be described as careful.

• Dragan is afraid of dying but what he’s afraid of more is the time that might come between being shot and dying.

• If people are going to be taken away from him, either through death or transformation of their personality that makes them into strangers, then he’s better off without them.

• And as afraid he is of dying, he’s more afraid of killing. He doesn’t think he could do it. He knows he wants to, sometimes, and that there are men on the other side who certainly deserve to die, but he doesn’t believe that he could perform the physical mechanics of it all.

• It isn’t clear to him how the world will think of the city now that thousands have been murdered. He suspects that what the world wants most is not to think of it at all.

• The opportunity to die was everywhere, and it just wasn’t that surprising when that opportunity became an event.

• A tall man with turbulent black hair, an almost comic moustache and the saddest face she has ever seen emerges from a doorway. He wears a slightly dusty tuxedo and carries a cello under one arm, a stool under the other. He walks out of the building with a calm and determined stride, appearing oblivious to the danger he’s putting himself in, sets his stool in the middle of the street, sits down and positions his instrument between his legs.

• A bullet leaves evidence that a mortar doesn’t.

• Emina shakes her head. “This cannot be as bad as what happened in those camps.” Dragan considers this, wonders how relative suffering is. “No it’s not. I don’t think he thought it would be. But I think he believed that what he and others suffered there meant something, that people had learned from it. But they haven’t.

• It’s just something you do because life is a series of tiny, unavoidable decisions.

• A weapon does not decide whether or not to kill. A weapon is a manifestation of a decision that has already been made.

• Calm down, she tells herself. Let this come to you. Let things happen as they are going to happen, and react as you are going to react. Don’t complicate it.

• Telling them there might be a sniper watching the bridge is a little like saying the sun has come up this morning.

• “Do you think,” Dragan asks, “It’s worse to be wounded or killed?” He’s not sure why he asked Emina this question. It seems almost frivolous, like asking if it’s better to be boiled alive using water or cooking oil.

• “Maybe he’s playing for himself,” he says. “Maybe it’s all he knows how to do, and he’s not doing it to make something happen”. And he thinks this is true. What the cellist wants isn’t a change, or to set things right again, but to stop things from getting worse.

• No sniper ever returns to the same place twice, particularly a place where someone else was killed.

• Do the men on the hills hate her? Or do they hate the idea of her, because she’s different from them, and that in this difference there might be some sort of inferiority or superiority that is hers or theirs, that in the en threatens the potential happiness of everyone?

• She watches the sniper through the scope of her rifle and listens to the music lift off the street. It makes her sad. A heavy, slow kind of sad, the sort that does not bring you to tears but makes you feel like crying. It is, she thinks the worst feeling there could be.

• If there were bodies in the streets, rotting where they fell, if the water from these taps didn’t wash away the blood and bone and skin, then maybe the men would be forced to stop, maybe they would want to stop.

• He remembers that the only person he needs to worry about watching him is one who’s looking through a scope.

• He’s tired. He’s tired from getting water, and he’s tired from the world he lives in, a world he never wanted and had no part in creating and wishes didn’t exist. He’s tired of carrying water for a woman who has never had a kind word to say to him, who acts as if she’s doing him a favour, whose bottles don’t have handles and who refuses to switch. If she likes the bottles so much, she should carry them to the brewery, she should watch as the street fills with blood and then washes itself clean, as a man stands with an empty leash and looks for a brown terrier while the dead are loaded into a van.

• The idea of knowing the moment of your death is imminent no longer seems so bad compared with an instantaneous ending.

• Wouldn’t it be better to get one last look at the world, even a grey and spoiled vision, than to plunge without warning into darkness?

• If that makes him a coward, he’s comfortable calling himself a coward. He isn’t built for war. He doesn’t want to be built for war.

• In the hills behind him a shell falls. It’s a language, a conversation of violence.

• Do they wish for this war to be over? Are they happy when they hit something, or is it enough to frighten people, to watch them run for their lives? Do they feel remorse when they go home and look at their children, or are they pleased, thinking they have done a great service for future generations?

• An explanation implies logic, but there’s no logic to Sarajevo now.

• Does she think she is good because she kills bad men? Is she? Does it matter why she kills them? Does the fact that she has good reason to hate them absolve her?

• It’s been a quiet day for the most part, but the sky is beginning to darken, and the men on the hills seem to have a fondness for marking the coming of night with shells. She’s often wondered if the shells remind them of fireworks.

• She’d just as soon sleep in her own bed. If she’s going to die, that’s where she’d like it to happen. It’s a small measure of control over an uncontrollable situation.

• In a smooth and easy motion she slips het rifle off her shoulder and into her hands. Even as she’s doing this she acknowledges that it is simply a reflex. It is unlikely her rifle can solve whatever is happening.

• Either way, this explosion came from the inside and wasn`t shellfire from the men on the hills. But no one says anything. After all, people are killed every day. Murder is commonplace. Why should this one be any different?

• They don’t appear to pose an immediate threat to her. They’re more likely messengers. Don’t shoot the messenger, the old saying goes, though she can’t remember exactly why.

• I will tell you the reality of Sarajevo. There is us and there is them. Everyone and I mean everyone, falls into one of these two groups. I hope you know where you stand.

• What could the man possibly hope to accomplish by playing music in the street? It wouldn’t bring anyone back from the dead, wouldn`t feed anyone, wouldn`t replace one brick.

• There are dead among the living, and they will be here long after this madness ends, if it ever ends.

• He knows he has been that dog. Ever since the war started he has walked through the streets and tried to pay as little attention as possible to his surroundings.

• A dead body won’t bother anyone. It will be a curiosity. But unless some viewer knew the hatless man it will mean nothing. There`s nothing in a dead body that suggests what it was like to be alive.

• All that matters is what he thinks. In the Sarajevo of his memory, it was completely unacceptable to have a dead man lying in the street. In the Sarajevo of today it’s normal. He has been living in neither, has tried to live in a city that no longer exists, refusing to participate in the one that does.

• There are no heroes, no villains, no cowards. There’s what he can do, and what he can’t. There’s right and wrong and nothing else. The world is binary. Shading will come later.

• Especially here. If this city is to die, it won’t be because of the men on the hills, it will be because of the people in the valley. When they’re content to live with death, to become what the men on the hills want them to be, then Sarajevo will die.

• He doesn’t want to walk through the streets of his city and look at the buildings and with every step be afraid that he’s about to be killed.

• The city is full of people doing the same as he is, and they all find a way to continue with life. They’re no cowards, and they’re not heroes.

• As long there’s war, life is a preventative measure.

• The cameraman has left, gone to a busier intersection. He needs people to take a chance to get shot, or shot at, or, if that doesn’t happen, at least look like they think they’re going to die. Eventually the cameraman will get what he wants. It’s only a matter of time.

• Yesterday it seemed it might rain, but there’s never any way to tell what will happen the next day until it comes.

Juanma es Collective Soul

"Bombs ,,. dropping down,,..

overhead,,.. underground,,.

its instilled,, to wanna live"

– Inignificance –

Pd1: mmm me parece ridículo que te guste un man que tiene novia, pero bueno, en fin, a las personas a la larga les gusta complicarse.

Pd2: Hoy pase por el restaurante Abasto y me acorde de María P. ¿en qué andará?

Pd3: The council has spoken! :)…

Pd4: Creo que las postdatas no dan a basto para dos posts en un mismo día.

Pd5: por eso no voy a escribir ni una más.