Outside, the Ontario landscape is bathed in that silvery light that only the north can provide. Over the past seventeen years, I have come to realise that Canada’s silence has been the best thing that has ever happened to me. Here, in my cabin, the air does not vibrate with the rebellious harp of the plains nor with the boisterous clamour of the gaita that marked my Christmases in Venezuela. Those sounds, though I respect them and live with them in my memory, were not my rhythms… a soundtrack I used to hear blaring through other people’s windows.

My true home was never in the furruco, but in the harmony of voices and the delicacy of an instrumental melody.

The stave of memory

I remember Caracas. I remember the first time my fingers brushed the keys of a piano. It was a spark, an immediate recognition, as if my hands had been waiting for that encounter for decades. However, life moves at its own pace. For years I made do with the simplicity of the recorder and, later, with the wooden embrace of the guitar. They were worthy substitutes, bridges that allowed me to read the stave and translate my emotions into notes, but the piano remained that deferred dream, a conversation yet to be had.

It wasn’t until I was well into my forties that I finally managed to get one of my own. Some say that by that age you’ve already figured out who you are, but for me, the piano marked the beginning of a second identity. I learnt by ear, letting my intuition guide my fingers towards the Bee Gees’ ballads that had such a profound impact on me. Their harmonies were more than just music; they were –and still are– my refuge. In ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ or ‘Massachusetts’, I found an elegant melancholy that closely resembled my own way of seeing the world.

Seventeen years ago, my musical score changed key. I swapped the tropics for the bilingual map of Ontario, for the confluence of British and French cultures, for a different way of life. Integrating myself didn’t mean erasing my past, but adding new bars to it. I always wonder if the sound of my piano changes with the weather. It’s not the same playing in the humid heat of a Caracas afternoon as it is here, surrounded by pine trees and snow, in a cabin that lacks professional acoustic conditions but possesses the soul of authenticity.

At my age, I devote a couple of hours a day to this transport ritual. I sit down at the piano, and I am not just an old man with grey hair; I am the child who listened to invisible instruments, the adult who studied music theory for two years to understand the reason behind his passion, and the immigrant who found a universal language in the keys.

I’m no expert – far from it – nor do I claim to be one. It’s enough for me to look at the notes on the stave and feel how the vibration of a well-crafted melody brings back fragments of my own history. When I play those old Bee Gees songs or an instrumental piece that gives me goosebumps, the distance between Venezuela and Canada vanishes. My cabin fills with memories, faces and places that are no longer there, but which remain alive in the resonance of a string struck by a felt plectrum.

As the years go by, music is just that: the only place we can always return to find ourselves, no matter how many borders we have crossed.

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