Muay Thai and accordions

The gym is small, a row of punching bags like sentries guarding the training area, opposite a mirror. The boxing ring hems you in on the left as you enter, an informational table, tiny, on the right. The room reeks of dried sweat, unwashed and unwashable mats, gloves, pads, fighters' bared feet and handwrapped hands. A frenetic dynamism everywhere in the room, a methodical whump-whump-whump of jump ropes echoing one another at the start of every hour.

Descending into the catharsis of violence, all you hear is your breath, heaving from deep in your chest, through your clenched teeth. Hhhh, hhhhh, hhhhh, the metronome for your jab-jab-cross, right kick, right-knee-left-knee jab-hook-jab, left kick. All the world is but pain and precision, precision and pain. You ration your energy, measure it in breaths, listening for each bell. Three minutes a round. Three rounds.

You see not a person, you fight not a person but targets, bulls-eye's, stomach, side, temple, cheek. It is pure rage, pure muscle, not malice or hate. It is a strange dissected emotion, limbless and malformed, unloved, unreal.

Which contrasts sharply with accordion playing later in the day, the doleful notes resuscitating memories of Metro stations and ancient archways in which/ under which beautiful and beautifully dressed French people sit and play. I had talked to one, sitting (as they do) on his accordion case near the marché at Denfert-Rochereau: he had come from the countryside, looking for a way and a place to be and to stay in Paris, and I thought his dream was not so different from mine, or from that of anyone who, in visiting a city, searches not for a physical place but an abstraction; it is (before you arrive) what you have always dreamed it will be, and whether the reality measures up is a different matter altogether.

So I played, and I haven't played in very long. Stumbling through the notes, I can hear only the mistakes. But the sound, the timbre, the rich, orchestral layering of hidden bellows enchant, and despite my poor playing, the music squeezes itself out beneath the clumsiness of my thick fingers, so recently ensconced in padded protective boxing gloves, and it is enough.

This was the beginning of a new routine. I will fill these unbearable waking moments with the things I love, and the things I love will make these unbearable waking moments just a little more tolerable.