Manual for Burning a Piano

You don't think about the music, you think about the image. You saw a film where a piano burned while the Dance of Fire played. That image stayed with you, more powerful than lessons, clearer than your teacher's words. You are eleven years old. A child does not yet understand what it means to profane an instrument, but you understand that something is about to be born from the fire.

You go down to the garage. The piano is there, solemn and silent, a wooden monster waiting. The gasoline cans are also waiting—that wonderful mistake left by someone else. You pour the liquid between the keys, the hammers, the secrets of the mechanism. You close the lid. The match strikes and there is no turning back. Now you play. Yes, you play while the fire works its way inside. The Dance of Fire sounds like never before. Every note is a crack, every arpeggio a creak. You are not a child: you are an arsonist who has discovered that music can burn.

The smoke rises, the wood twists. The piano moans in sounds that were never in the score. Outside the neighbors are stirring, but you keep going, you don't stop. It is your first great revelation: art and destruction can be the same thing.

Water falls in buckets, the fire is smothered, only the blackened skeleton of the piano remains. Your grandparents look at you with horror, but not with hatred. No one hits you. No one insults you. They take you to a psychologist, as if they wanted to extinguish that fire inside you too. But it is too late. What you discovered can never be extinguished.

You don't know it yet, but that fire will be your first work. The power was not in the piano—it was in you: in daring to play while everything burned. And ever since, every time you perform, a part of you remembers the smoke, the flames, the distorted sound that was your true initiation. The fire passed, but it never went out.