Chaconne, Johann Sebastian Bach: Transcribed by Ferruccio Dante Michelangelo Benvenuto Busoni

car crash, followed by dead people.

A storm just ended a while ago.  The walkway, grey, with uninhibited trash floating around the sides, and as the wind continues there is no story in sight.  Cars pass on the streets next to the floating garbage.  A smell of destitute nothingness invades the pedestrian as they make their way down the sidewalks into the next collection of despairing moments---pushing the rock up the hill, for no apparent reason.  Dwindling down the hill, a reckless cruiser, driving, makes her way slowly but surely.  She’s crying.  Her past-shoulder dark black hair waving in long strokes, curly and a day unwashed, in the breeze that makes its way throughout the car that she has stolen.  Her black thin t-shirt clings to her chest.  Braless, her n*****s command attention---if there was anyone paying attention.  And maybe that’s just it.  Maybe that’s why we find this young beautiful woman on the road at daybreak in a stolen car, hungry and lonely, wandering with nothing but the post-storm dew to keep her company.  And the lies she has told are gone.  And her cigarettes too, are gone.  And the tears still come.  They drip, drip drip---continuing down the slope of her cheek.  And she wonders about the days that will come.  And she does her best not to remember a day that has passed.  She breathes and rides in the moment---with no one watching, no one counting, and no one caring for the minutes that she dances atop the needlepoint. 

 

The car, stumbling its way down the hill, begins to hiccup.  The engine rumbles and roars, like a lion making his own way through a newly post-storm high-grass plain.  Darting further into the midst of the mist, she slams her foot down on the brake, as she sees a body passing from the left side of the road now---pushing a cart of some sort.  As she keeps speeding down, she notices two things simultaneously---One: her car will not stop, as her brakes no longer seem to work.  Two: the thing that is passing in front of her is an old woman pushing a baby carriage.  No doubt, we can believe that in the next split seconds, our driving & beautiful young woman, crying and lonely (deprived of sleep, food & consolation), now realizes quickly how close her own death may be, as well as the death of those that pass in front of her increasingly speeding car, whose brakes will not work. 

 

Her heart begins to pump so rapidly and pounding in her chest, her crying stops out of sheer terror and her muscles tense up so tightly.  Her leg, thrusting down in stabbing motions at the brake pedal, hitting it from every angle---she urinates in her jeans and screams as the whole seen pulls up close on her, now nearly a few feet from collision---instinctively now she jerks the steering wheel as far to the right as she can in a last bit attempt to move the car away from the two crossing.  To save them and not herself, she makes this last gesture of humanity, as if to punctuate a life, which, based on the last few moments of her life, no doubt seethed with humanity, shown in her own most personal way. 

 

The car flies past the front of the carriage, only a few inches away.  The blast of air from the car avec the roar of the car’s sound, attack the carriage holding baby & old woman (most probably a grandma figure).  The carriage tips over, spinning a few feet down the street.  In doing so, the baby flies out, its head smashing and pouring open like a fresh egg from the supermarket, cracked on the side of a bowl and ready for stirring.  Grandma gets hit in the leg by the moving carriage and it trips her up.  She falls backwards and lands on her fragile hip---breaking it into a thousand pieces.  She lapses into shock and her heart, trying to deal with the whole situation, stops. 

 

Our young woman in the car, screaming and pissing herself, holds with both hands and arms, clutching to the steering wheel.  The car billowing into the sidewalk, wheels catching oddly, at the same moment the side of the car stalled and torn by a sign bent in the wrong way (no doubt half-destroyed in an early collision)---flips sideways, back over front, finally colliding and coming to a halt after thrashing through a house whose front porch, enclosed in glass, held many plants---exotic ones, no less.  Glass shattering in all directions, the young woman, who did remember to wear her seatbelt, is torn in half by the whole ordeal.  Part of her is pushed down into the bottom of the car and the top half passes almost out a now opened and curling side door.  When the car lands, covered in debris, but taking no more victims, the glass from all said contributors, comes sprinkling down upon the remains of the crash.  What is left of everything seems to sigh one last sigh, dying gracefully, poetically---as eloquently as it had all waltzed in.