I was amazed by the truth and was furious. I took three days off, followed Yingxiu for two days, and met the two people at the door of a shopping mall. The girl has long hair and a shawl, wears light makeup, looks beautiful, and has a camera around her neck. Yingxiu was submissive in front of him, full of joy. I approached them and stood in the middle of them, and Yingxiu asked me how I was in that place. I told Yingxiu that there was a client in this place who just needed a picture and needed a camera, so I asked me to use it. I took Yingxiu and the shopping guide to an alley where I had actually painted, and I hung the camera around my neck, which weighed at least five pounds. Instead of slapping the slap, I threw a punch to the ground.

"Get out of here,," I said, "this camera is mine." ”

Yingxiu grabbed me by the neckline, wanting to avenge her sweetheart, her eyes spewing with anger - and the lonely look of whimpering when she went to borrow money from me - she couldn't hide it from others.

"Come on. I glared into Yingxiu's eyes: "Punch me twice and let the rotten lying on the ground see how stupid you are." ”

Yingxiu didn't hit me, turned around to support the shopping guide lying on the ground, the shopping guide didn't know whether it was painful or scared, she kept crying, and Yingxiu kept coaxing her. I pointed to the two people on the ground and warned them that I would never be lenient when I saw them doing this kind of reluctance, like the chivalrous man in a martial arts novel, and he would not back down. After that, he took the camera and walked away.

Three days later, I saw Yingxiu, his face scarred and his eyes blank, as if he had just died once. The shopping guide gathered a fox friend who was also in the city and beat Yingxiu severely, they forced Yingxiu to ask for my information, and threatened to break one of my legs, so that I could only spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. Yingxiu was like the last soldier holding his position, preferring to die rather than obey, and said a philosophical sentence: "If you beat me, you will beat him, you can fight." ”

I didn't expect to bring such a pain to Yingxiu, I couldn't be angry, but it didn't help to do anything. But in hindsight, the pain of the flesh is always better than the pain of the heart. In the days that followed, Yingxiu was like a walking corpse, almost without eating or drinking, and his boss came to me - I once drew for him a summer lying on a willow tree singing.

"He's going to disappear if he loses any more weight. He said, "Persuade him in your native language." ”

I said yes, but I didn't try to persuade it, and I was convinced that the more I persuaded it, the worse it became. Although I have suffered the loss of time, I still believe that time can heal all pains. Yingxiu is a flowery and grassy, but principled, The Walking Dead is just a relative word. One Saturday afternoon, Yingxiu asked me to go with Qiu Pei to his place for dinner, and I didn't call Qiu Pei — there was no reason to invite her to come with me. Yingxiu was still thin but looked recovering, he was radiant, leaning on the back of the sofa with Erlang's legs crossed, and introduced me to a short-haired girl next to him: "This is my hair small, a painter, he slept on this sofa every night more than a year ago looking for the future. "When I left, Yingxiu sent me out, and his new appearance was not around, and I wanted to apologize for that incident. Yingxiu told me not to say it, and told me that everything was over. I asked him if the girl was staying with him for the night, and he shrugged and said, "Then it depends on whether she has a good time for dinner, but I'm confident in my cooking." "He did cook a good meal, which all his friends recognized.

On the afternoon of the day I knocked down the shopping guide, I went back to the house and trembled with fear, it was the first time in more than 20 years of my life that I had hit someone - it was a woman. It's hard to imagine how I restrained myself at the scene, and I was so tough that I hit and hit without stumbling at all. It's just that I didn't think about the consequences carefully, and the only consequence I thought of was that Yingxiu and the shopping guide had a complete falling out, so as to save Yingxiu. That night, the piano lesson continued, and the horror of the beating had not yet completely dissipated, and my fingers did not obey, occasionally trembling and limp. Before Qiu Pei opened her mouth to ask me, I asked her, "What do you think of the man who beats the woman, even if the fault is not all on the woman's side?"

"Cowards!" she said, "Men who beat women are not good things. ”

Her answer made me blame myself in my heart, that incident itself was not all the fault of the shopping guide, Yingxiu, as the most important party, was afraid to bear all the responsibility, and I hit the person who was forced to pull into the puzzle. I've been trying to find a reason why I hit that girl, and I've always believed that the reason why I did it wasn't just to save Yingxiu. Years later, when I was playing a piece in front of a piano worth more than 200,000 yuan that I didn't know the name of, I finally figured out what gave me the courage to strike that punch. The fall of Yingxiu reminded me of the suffering I had fallen into, just as I could easily see from the whimpering look in his eyes when he borrowed my money, he was pitiful and entangled in love, and I also skillfully opened the valve of memory, and the grievances and unwillingness of the past followed, and I didn't want to see anyone self-destruct again—especially my friends.

Qiu Pei's answer kept me awake all night, and I recalled the resoluteness with which she said that "a man who beats a woman is not a good thing", as if she had been beaten by a man and had a grudge for the rest of her life. I opened the window, and the mosquitoes flew in and disappeared from the mosquito scent, the insects chirped underground, and the salty taste of the sea breeze in the distance was a little bitter.

Qiu Pei said that my talent in music was far less than in painting, and she even advised me to try to give up the piano first, and learn something simpler, such as the ocarina, which can only breathe and blow rhythm, and then learn more difficult when I really understand the music.

"Don't say that, I'm a slow starter. I said, "When I first started learning to draw, my painting teacher told me not to learn to draw but to learn music." ”

I've always believed that music is a skill that can be practiced just like painting, but there is one thing that I can't do no matter how hard I practice. It was hard for me to hear each key and the corresponding pitch, and I could only tell the pitch by the timbre, but I couldn't tell what the pitch was. I'm afraid no one can hear that. She said anyone who could play the piano could hear it.

After I had been practicing with my hand on the piano for more than two months, she took me to a banquet hall in their hotel, where a piano was on the main stage. She said that the banquet hall was rarely free, and that day happened to be free, and she had a good relationship with her colleagues, and asked for the key to the banquet hall, only saying that she was going to familiarize herself with a song and prepare for a banquet in half a month. The ballroom was huge, very, and when we went inside, she closed the door and turned on the lights along the wall, and I followed her all the way to turn off the lights that had been turned on, until at last there were only two lights left on the main stage, and the black piano paint reflected a bright dark red glow in the light. She played "The Sound of Silence" first, and when the first note sounded, the silence of the entire banquet hall was broken, and then one note after another popped out of the piano and echoed through the empty banquet hall. The silence made the sound of the piano high-pitched, and I was afraid that the sound of the piano would be heard outside through the thick doors and walls and be discovered by the staff. But her casual appearance reassured me, and I was completely immersed in her sound. It was the first time I had heard a person play the piano in such a quiet environment – playing for me alone, I always thought she played the piano well, but never felt that she played so well. The sound of the piano swept through the heart, awakening the memories and taking away the sorrow, leaving only empty and peaceful thoughts drifting through the ballroom with the notes. It was a feeling that I will never forget.

When she was done, she turned sideways, stretched out her arm, and made a gesture with her index finger that asked me to pass: "Painter, come here." The sound of the piano was gone, and the hall was quieter, her voice clean and crisp, with an irresistible temptation. The dark red lighting makes the stage look cramped, like a dream coast. She asked me to sit on the stool and rotate the knobs on either side of the stool to adjust to the height that suited me. She pulled a chair from the audience and sat next to me. The silence and light made me intoxicated and timid.

"What's next?" I asked her.

"First of all. She said, "Put your hands on the keys." ”

It dawned on me and put my hands on the keys.

"Play a piece that you usually practice. She said.

"I don't remember anything. I said, "Just the scales." ”

"Then play the scales again. She said, "At least you remember the scales, don't you?" ”

For the first time in my life, I pressed the keys of a piano and it felt hard, soft and bouncy. I never forgot that I pressed a C button in the bass range. I calmed my senses and played an octave scale. She told me to continue, and I continued to play it again. She asked me to continue, and I remembered the song I practiced on the piano with my hand in the room where the salty and bitter sea breeze often blew into it. I played "Little Star" first, and then "Sadness or Happiness". I breathed a long sigh of relief and sat in a standard position, waiting for her comments.

"How does it feel?" she asked.

"It's completely different from what I practiced before. I said sadly, "I used to practice in vain." ”

"It's good to know. "But you have to remember that you didn't practice in vain, you practiced well and played well," she said. ”

After that, she started to get me to feel the power of the piano keys and showed me how to use the sustain pedal. She was conscientious and responsible, busy guiding me in the dim red light, and my clumsy fingers made the piano sound chaotic, without the slightest sense of rhythm, purely creating strings of noise. On the first day, we practiced for three hours in the ballroom, and for most of the rest of the day we practiced the piano in my room. Occasionally, I would go to the banquet hall of the hotel under her arrangement, and I thought that I had grown a lot, and I became proficient in some simple tunes. Eventually, technology has advanced, and with a hand-rolled piano with pedals, my practice has become more effective.