SHORT STORIES

PLAY THE PRELUDES
TO MR JOHNSON

I am from a very fortunate family of Majorca. Well, we are not very much from Majorca for my father is from Teruel, a small town in mainland Spain, and my mother came from Zaragoza. They both had worked very hard in the hotel trade, making efforts to save money from the banal consumerism so we have been able to pay for a very nice house. It has a small garden and two spare rooms we use to rent to some English tourists as they keep coming faithfully back every year like the swallows in the springtime.

In our family we all have something in common. Well, very nearly, as we are all from the truly Church of the Jehovah's Witnesses. From this very moment, I beg your pardon for the numerous times our missioners have been knocking on your home's door. I understand most of you have been feeling very disturbed with our visit. Perhaps you were watching your favorite soap opera on TV or the best football match of the season. But I hope you could understand and forgive us for all the nuisance we caused for we were acting under the direct command of God Himself. He had ordered us to go knocking everyday from door to door announcing the good news of the Kingdom to all the infidels of this world. Sorry to be frank, my dear readers, but that means you. In fact, I should not be talking to you directly for I am not grown enough to chat freely with the heathen. I would be risking the safety of my soul.
    I said that we are a happy family and I am not lying at all but just a little. My mamma is very kind and straightforward. I do not know from where did she get her manners from, for they are not match for our rural grandparents from Zaragoza. Even our countryside grandparents from Teruel can not understand our fine manners. Perhaps they look at us with some distrust since they knew already we are members of the truly Church of Jesus Christ, the son of God. We have made countless efforts to save their souls from the Valley of Darkness but to no avail. They refuse stubbornly to enter into the precious Light of Heaven.
    One of the things that make us such an interesting people is that we are very happy awaiting the Doomsday. That is the day of the Armageddon to put things rightly, a scary day for all the heathen that refused to hear the good messages from Jehovah. For all this is revealed to us by the true scriptures.
    Besides having a beautiful house, we have also precious furniture, a Chestshire's cat and a Goldenstein piano. Well, some people say there is not any breed of cats called Cheshire but we love to think this is the real breed of our cat. Our house has also some large windows, very much appreciated by our English guests. One used to say that the very Grace of God comes into our living room with the purest sunshine of this island.

I was saying that we have a beautiful house but we have also a small garden that is enlivened with some flowery dahlias and rhododendrons. What I wanted to say is that we have a cat that is mostly sleeping all day over the piano. It is precisely this piano that the supervisor came often to our house with a curious story about. He says that we must sell the piano. My mother was stunned the first time she heard that. He said that we should give all the money to the true church of Jehovah for charitable purposes as the first Christians were doing. I do not know all the scripture yet but it seems to me that the first Christians were a bunch of primitive people that had no pianos at all. Even I have some doubts if they had a tawny cat. They didn't even had cars to go every day to work in and all these complications of modern life we have. They were all wearing tunics and had all the time of the world to keep arguing for days and weeks about the meaning of every word the Messiah said. Moreover, I had never read any single word about any Goldenstein pianos in the Holy Scriptures. That is we are not buying this idea of selling the piano. The main reason is that we would lose most of the charm we have. It is thing is to be truly Jehovah's Witnesses and a very different matter that we would have to turn into a bunch of primitive Christians. If we were to do this we would lose most of our cosmopolitan manners.
    You can not believe me but besides the large windows, the cat and the piano, we have something like a charming charisma.

The supervisor, that is the equivalent of a priest to the pagan people, comes very often to our home to have tea, and he swallows lots and lots of the expensive Danish biscuits. I think that being a supervisor he must be more austere and ought to eat less butter biscuits for he is growing a big belly. Moreover, he is always arguing about selling the piano but he likes very well to ask my sister to play for him some piece of music. If we were to sell the piano how could my sister play the preludes for him anymore? My sister is very kind and always plays for him something he likes. You can see him besotted when my sister is playing Chopin.
    My sister plays the piano very well. She is specialised in fine music, mostly Chopin. She also can play some pieces of Tchaikovsky but these are a lot more difficult. I can not play the piano but sometimes I can bang a potpourri. They all say that I have no ear for the music. My sister Helena passes most of the time practising to finish her piano studies. But my mamma always says she has to practice more and more. I think it would be better if she would enter into a hotel to work at something. But my mum does not want her to quit.

Sometimes, in the winter, Mister Johnson of Newton Abbot comes to our home. This town is about on the part of Devon. As soon you arrive sailing to the English Channel you get Newton Abbot at the left hand.
   Mr. Johnson is always complaining about the humidity of his country as if we here had not our own share of humidity like everybody else. He likes mostly the large windows we have and always repeats that the blessing of God enters by them. As the English people that stayed at our home are mostly pagans, that is they are not of the true Church of God, sometimes the supervisor comes with a tittle-tattle trying to get some money. He says all the money that you would give to God will be returned at an interest of a hundred to one. He says this is much more than any bank in the earth could ever pay. Not the stock exchange, not even the Bonds of the USA's government could compare with the interest that God would give back to us. My mum seems to keep her purse tight but the supervisor keeps arguing that the brothers are gossiping that we are getting rich. He says that he argues in favour of us and he tells them that all that glitters is not gold and that we have a lot of bills to pay.
    We are not worried by all this gossip but nevertheless my mum always gives the supervisor some money at the time he is leaving.

We know very well the tastes and fancies of Mr. Johnson. My mum prepares him the tea at the ancient manner that he loves. He abhors the horrible bags to make tea. So my mum plays a very complex ritual that looks as if she had been learning in a school of Geishas in Kyoto. Mr. Johnson also loves the butter Danish biscuits. He lounges in the couch with delight and outstretches his legs. Then my mum says in singing voice: "Helen, my dear! Can you play the preludes to Mr. Johnson?"
    My sister was waiting for this very moment of glory and she is very happy. Her face is shining with heavenly light and looks like an angel that had come to the earth. She sits properly in the stool before the piano and starts to play the preludes of Chopin. I can see Mr. Johnson is getting excited with the melody and looks as in a daze. He must be for I know the ability my sister has in her fingers when he plays something. She has the softer fingers I had ever touched. They are like silk and always are warm. So you can see they are very pleasurable.
    While my sister is playing Mr. Johnson is getting in a kind of trance and half closing his eyes. Sometimes in a silence of the melody it seemed to me that our guest is kind of gasping softly. But I can not be very sure of this for the silence last only a second or less.
    I think Mr. Johnson comes every year here because my sister plays the preludes to him very well.

Other guests also come to our house once or twice a year. Such is the case of Mr. John Haddock of Salisbury. He also likes to take the tea at five o'clock in the evening, like any good decent English, but instead of Danish biscuits he prefers a good piece of apple pie. My mother does it very well; she likes to put cinnamon on the apple and a little ginger to the pastry. We often call him "the mister" because sometimes he is a little uptight. He likes also to listen "the preludes" that my sister plays but I am sure that he prefers "the nocturne" plays. My sister has an inbred penchant to be hospitable and cosmopolitan like the rest of the family. So she is very good at playing the "nocturnes" of Chopin and other famous composers.
    Besides my sister playing the piano, one of the best things about us is that we are Christians of the very true faith. That is other people live a sad life and are not happy because they are not living in the true faith like we are. Moreover they have not a piano and a Cheshire's cat. These things help us a lot to be happy but not many people knows it. The most important thing in our Church is that when Doomsday would arrive all those unfaithful people will get very annoyed with the bad news and Jesus will thrown them all in Hell for eternity. But we will remain here in this earth living as the blessed people of Jehovah. And the earth will be free at last of all kind of pollution and all the animals will become vegetarians. So the lion will be grazing grass beside the lambs and the sheep. And the snakes will not harm anyone of the Lord's faithful because they would have lost their venom forever. Instead of that they will eat apples and pears and all kind of fruits that would fall from the trees.
    The adults and the children will not grow older ever more. The children will remain as such for all eternity. And we all will be forever happy. I am just imagining my mum scolding my younger brother of seven, "David! Please, do me a favour and take out the finger out of your nose!" Then my brother will take out his finger. Then, after a while, when my mum is not watching, he will put his finger in the nose again.
    The young girls will spend all the eternity fooling around with older boys without arriving at anything at all. For they will lack maturity and even a little lust, for they will never grow older. They will spend their lives in an eternal adolescence. I even will be forever playing with my hand inside my trousers' pocket for the thing gets hard and pleasant. That is that I am already fourteen and I will remain playing like this for all eternity. Then my mum will be aware of my playing and will shout at me: Please, Jack! Do not touch in there, or it will grow a bigger thing! And we will be living like this for all eternity.
    The mums will remain in such state forever. They will not grow any fatter or older. They will no be expecting babies any more and they will live a careless life for ever and ever. And as the Lord does not like to watch people copulating by the sunny meadows or the woods I do not know how would the married adults cope with the situation. I think that the case of the single people will be most difficult. I imagine that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, they will give them all a kind of hypnosis, wiping off of their minds their sinful lust forever. I think that this drive we call lust must be one of those items that come out a bad thing after the Creation. You see that a little after creating the Lust, the Lord himself has been very much against it. He has been forbidding it throughout on all pages of the Holy Scriptures.
    So I am imagining the Lord showering the meadows and the woodlands with a kind of "anti-lust" contraceptive dew. In this way it will be avoided that the sheep and all other living creatures will get impregnated. In this way it will be avoided that the beasts of the field would grow in a disordered manner, exhausting the grazing lands.
    We got very nice books where the artists show us how the blessed lands of the earth would look after Doomsday. They show us the green pastures forever green as the clouds will obey the will of the Lord and every day at the sunset it will shower to keep the grass fresh and green all year round. We will be also vegetarians and we could be grazing beside all the beasts of the land. We will be grazing beside the lions, goats, sheep and all kinds of four legs creatures. But I am not at all sure that I would love to be grazing in this way for all the eternity.

I would rather like to be seen as a bunch of good christian primates hanging on the branches of trees and eating all kind of sweet fruits. I would tell to the supervisor for the need to change this very point in the printed pictures. In this way the artist will paint us as a happy band of chimps eating figs, apricots and peaches. I am now thinking that the Lord, in his divine wisdom, would make the trees bearing fruits throughout the year. I do not think it would be wise to let the Blessed faithful feeling hungry for the most part of the year. For we will be living in the open like in the Garden of Eden. So it is a need that all the trees would be bearing fruits all year round.
    All this is very nice and pretty. We would have to be blessed with a kind of amnesia so we will not remember all those poor unbelievers that will be suffering in Hell for all eternity. I think that they will surely deserve it for they have banged their doors before the very noses of our hard walker Missionaries. They are going from door to door in the name of God to spread the Good News but the unfaithful do not give a damn for the true words of Jehovah and his son, Jesus.

Just now I must confess we have a small hole in our happiness. That is because our father has become an apostate and is not living with us anymore. I can not understand how a true faithful of our church can become that. I would like to meet him and ask what happened to his faith, why he threw a future of happiness away. Why he rejected the prospect of being a blithe family grazing forever on the succulent and fresh meadows of Our Lord.

The other day I met my uncle Federico that is not of the true Church like we are. I asked him about my father and why he had become an apostate. He replied: "Your father what?" And I said "why he become an apostate and left us?" Then he answered: "This is all bullshit, boy. He just fell in love with his secretary. She is very gorgeous and twenty years younger. That is why he left."

I was wondering since, why my dad, a little pudgy already, had been enraptured by a fit of lust. I think that because of his weakness we could not ever be together enjoying the sweet fruits in the Garden of Eden. We will never be together eating canned peaches in syrup in our garden, or eating apple pies with cinnamon and ginger any more in the future.
    I had to ask the supervisor what would be the fate of an apostate like my father after the Armageddon. Well, I have better forget to ask him about this. For he surely would scorn me saying: "You seem to be a little strayed, boy! Be careful or you are going to follow the same path as your father!"

A WITNESS