The Furniture Song

At one time or another, a professional man, neither of his choice nor his will, has to make a sacrifice in order to fulfill a professional obligation. For Cipriano d’Golgo it was leaving his modern ninth floor city apartment with a balcony, and all the furniture there, to live deep into the Woodland Territories.

It wasn’t easy parting with a place he and his wife Cipriana had called their home for too many years already, but what was more unbearable was parting with their furniture. Weeks after the couple had got used to the peace and quiet of the countryside, weeks after Cipriano had got used to getting drunk and not going to the balcony to urinate to the ground nine stories below, they still couldn’t get over the reality that they were now without them.

Cipriana’s health quickly declined 2 months after moving to the Woodland Territories. The doctor they visited said something of a disease of some kind, something Cipriano didn’t even bother remembering. He didn’t bother remembering because he knew it wasn’t true. He knew what caused Cipriana to be ill. It was missing their furniture.

“But we can get them here, can’t we?” asked his ailing wife.

“For too many times we’ve tried convincing the authorities of that, but they wouldn’t tolerate it. You know this, Cipriana.”

“I’m dying here.”

“Don’t say that, Cipriana. Don’t say that.”

“Can’t we at least get some pass and visit the apartment one last time?”

“Don’t say that, too, Cipriana. Whoever told you anything is your last time?”

“No one, my butterball. It’s just that, it’s too unfair for the Woodland Territories to take us in and never ever let us go out into the world. Not even once. I miss our apartment. I miss our furniture.”

The tears Cipriano had been fighting very hard to hold back now gushed out of his eyes like the Juortro Falls not more than eight kilometers from the Woodland Territories Community Hospital. “I know you do. I miss the furniture too.”

“Then let’s go visit the apartment. Let us get us some leave, or something. A notarized legal promise that we’ll come back before sundown. And let’s further add that it’s purely for sentimental reasons that we want to go to the city for awhile. Absolutely no spilling of the secrets of the Pinefr—”

At this Cipriana coughed. The average number of sentence she could utter lately was three, four at most if none of them were compound. Cipriano’s heart bled for her all the more.

“You know that that is one thing the authorities wouldn’t allow either. We are not allowed to get out of here. Not that we’re imprisoned or anything. It is thought that everything we need is here. It is said that everything here is Oh, So Ideal, the inhabitants can’t possibly want to move out.”

“Sounds to me like 100% bull—” and she had another coughing fit.

“I’m sorry,” Cipriano said. “I’m sorry I had us move here.”

“Don’t be, don’t be. It was career advancement you were pursuing. Here they’ve got for you a job where they treat you like a human being—in fact, more than a human being. Here people literally bow down to you.”

“That is quite true.”

“Here they’ve got a job for me as well, so your decision was for my good, too.”

“Another good point.”

“Plus, they were threatening to get and bring to a slow death everyone we love. You didn’t want that, and so your decision was for their good too.”

Cipriano’s tears gushed out stronger than before. “Oh, true, true!”

True also it was that Cipriana’s death was one of the greatest losses in Cipriano’s life. Nothing, however, was a greater loss to him that his separation from the furniture he and Cipriana had kept and maintained when they still dwelled in the city. Several years after his wife passed away, his longing to return to the city and see the furniture was as fervent as the first year since moving to the Woodland Territories. The imaginary conversations (and sometimes arguments) with his deceased wife had long stopped, but the dreams in which he was back to the old apartment, touching and surrounded by the furniture never ceased.

The dreams plagued him. In the long years with which he could reassess his life, he found that he stayed with Cipriana only secondarily out of love. His primary reason for staying faithful to her all the years they’d been together, he came to understand, was a subconscious fondness of the furniture. Separation from his wife meant they would have to divide all their properties in half, and that included the furniture. Though he had no particular favorite among the furniture, he knew that if his wife took away some of them, things wouldn’t be the same.

This same sentiment he was sure his wife also felt, and he was glad to see how it only proved that they were meant for each other. Of all the people alive during their generation, who would have thought they would find each other, with matching given names, and approximately equal love for the furniture they would buy and sometimes assemble with their own hardships?

Approximately equal? Cipriano suddenly wanted to question that. His wife had fallen ill and eventually died due to their separation from the furniture, while he, other than an unbearable loneliness that sometimes almost drove him out of his mind, was a completely healthy individual. How dare he think that his love for the furniture was even worthy of comparison to that of his wife?

It was perhaps during that point that Cipriano took it upon himself to write a song in tribute to their furniture. He accepted that perhaps it wasn’t his fate to die due to missing the furniture, like his wife did, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t make something beautiful as a song to relive the days in the old apartment in the presence of the furniture.

He called it “The Furniture Song” long before he knew what words to put into it, how the melody would go, and what key with which to play it. Since the d’Golgo ancestral mellotron was one of the pieces of furniture he had left in the city apartment, he had to improvise with what musical instrument the Woodland Territories afforded him.

Out of the kabuki reed abundant in the Kabuki Marshes, he assembled a modest enough reed organ. Some of the reed he turned into simple flutes. From the bamboo pines growing practically on everyone’s backyard in the Woodland Territories, he made chimes, a xylophone, more woodwind instruments, and with the addition of a hollowed out melon, an imitation of a sitar.

More instruments he constructed out of the materials made available to him by the Woodland Territories, until one day he found that he had a whole orchestra’s worth of it. It was an achievement, no doubt, and yet it dismayed him that with all the instruments for playing any music he desired, not a note, not a word, was laid out for “The Furniture Song”.

The following years were then committed to actually writing “The Furniture Song”. He had two approaches to writing: one was music first, and the other was words first. None of these two he considered either easier or more difficult than the other. This didn’t mean, though, that using any or both produced any satisfactory output—because it didn’t.

Cipriano was frustrated. It didn’t help at all that all the effort didn’t for a microsecond take his mind off missing the furniture.

Years passed him by—many, many years. One afternoon, out of fear of losing count, he took a current calendar and with the year information it provided he computed first how long ago since he settled in the Woodland Territories, then how long ago since his wife died, and last, how old he was.

Eighty years, he counted, it was since he moved to the Woodland Territories with his wife, eighty years also since he lost her, and that number added to his age when they left the city, thirty-four, he figured out with very little difficulty that he was now a hundred and fourteen years old.

One more check at the information provided by the calendar and he realized that he was in fact to celebrate his one hundred and fifteenth birthday in less than two weeks.

For some strange reason, this got him excited, as if something special was awaiting him on that hundred and fifteenth birthday. For the first time in many years—in fact, eighty—hope came alive in him. A smile cracked his aged face, and it felt to him so good. He would forever remember that afternoon, because it was the afternoon he wrote the first line with which people from that point on would associate exclusively with “The Furniture Song”.

© Jay Santos 2003.