Balatonfüred, Hungary
The Ferencsik János Music School is housed in a 17th century villa built by a statesmen and inhabited, in succession, by an aristorcrat/ poet, a revolutionary who lost it in the uprising against the Hapsburgs in 1848, a British architect, and after the occupation of Hungary by Soviet forces in 1949, the Soviet secret police who used is as a headquarter and prison.
If I were a painter, I’d paint the shadow of the chestnut leaf in that splotch of light on the acacia’s trunk. I’d paint the dove gray of the concrete flagstones with their spackling of pigeon shit, pepper grass and morning glories growing in the cracks. For the pink of the stucco house across the lawn, for the liver color of the roof tiles, for the sienna flush of brick chimneys against the sky, I’d start with alizarin, some umber, some ochre, maybe red lake, maybe blood, maybe that blood tint glinting beneath Lake Balaton’s viridian at sundown.
If I were a painter I’d paint the buzz saw whine of scooters snarling up and down the village streets named after suicidal poets. I’d paint the daily morning winds from the lake, worrying the curtains, nagging at the treetops. I’d paint the mustard yellow of the crumbling villa, cotton white in the pockmarks of its crumbling. I’d mix deep maroon for the factory owner’s manor (he of the Swiss bank account, formerly of the secret police). To make the hollows under someone’s eyes– someone’s eyes, but whose?– I’d use cobalt, silvery as that philandering Serbian’s businessman’s Porsche. (On the road to Veszprém, he squeezed his teenage girlfriend’s tit in front of me, bragged they weren’t silicone.) The red church turns cool white in moonlight; the white church glows like sulfur.
The language falls from the tongues of those who speak it to the pavement, flutters and tries to rise, flutters like a bird gasping with its beak open, a bird panting, a bird whose breast beats but whose eyes fix on its future just before it falls to its side, continuing to pant. To paint the beating, feathered words I’d use ivory black for depth, Chinese white for thickness, cadmium for poison, Prussian blue for music. I’d peel pieces of the leaded paint from walls and eat the bittersweet of centuries, pick away to the nineteenth’s ochres, the seventeenth’s powder blues and gilt, to the sixteenth’s transcendent pinks until lead sweetened and settled and addled and weighted and anchored my brain to this ground. I’d go down. I’d scrape the rust from the pipes in the basement, sweep the webby corners for the sifted grit, and in it I would know were the fingernails, the flakes of skin, the strands of hair, the fingerprints, the teeth, the excrement, the groans of the tortured, the grease from their sweat. I would lift the imprints of the buttocks of naked men flung to the cement floor and left there from November to March, long enough to forget what it is to be human.
I’d paint the drip of water from overhead pipes. The water with a tint to it. And newsprint. And everywhere the pounding American pop music that means that now they’re free. And apricots. And plums like royalty among the leaves. Grackles in the trees. Blue skies and constant wind. Constant wind.
- On Lake Balaton, at the Ferencsik János Music School - December 11, 2024