I love the hands that bless and caress, kind hands that embrace and welcome, powerful hands that gently touch the marrow of the soul, creating a new life, hands in which a loving current circulates so great that everything they feel is transformed into great happiness.
Romayne Wheeler
Today is celebrated Resurrection of Christ and I try to make them feel how music and the nature They also resume the beautiful. The protagonists of this story are the hands of an American pianist assimilated to the Rarámuri culture and an impressive landscape of the Sierra Tarahumara.
I got there because of the impulse of my husband, Fernando Estandía González Luna, who never stops getting to know the unique men and their works. He wanted to know how a grand piano that belonged to his great-aunt Amparo Morfín, a concert pianist from Jalisco, got to that hidden canyon. We were accompanied by Nicolás Rhodes and Inés, the daughter he has with my dear friend Ana Paula Margain, a talented young woman who has just been accepted into BIMN University Berlin, House of Music.
We had to fly to Chihuahua and go by road and dirt, for more than ten hours, to the Eagle's Nest in Retosachi, where Romayne Wheeler lives and with her Steinway piano.
Here are my impressions of the journey: Air made of air, lichens on the trunks and clearings on the horizon. Sculptured stone cannons with divine wedge. Light and shadow of God.
Masks without artist or culture of the features of Mother Nature, of the corners of beauty and amazement. The silence is hidden between the exposed roots, the thorns of the cacti, the burnt moss, the red leaves of the oaks, the tiny pink flowers of the peaches and the falling afternoon.
The rocks compete with the clouds and the rustle of dry leaves with the whistle of the wind that lifts them. The pine cones refuse to accompany its flight and remain attached to the dry branches of the pine trees. The Rarámuris with flaming skirts and incomplete dentures tear out the relief of the bushes and the transparent water. The weeping willows stop their fall like the season at the appearance of snow. It's March and a piano awaits us at Retosachi. Yes, we are going to find the keys that will sing the history of a piano.
Thus, we arrive at the Eagle's Nest and Romayne Wheeler welcomes us dressed in a yellow shirt like the ones worn by his neighbors, beneficiaries of the altruistic work he has undertaken for more than thirty years: with the profits from the concerts he gives around the world, finances a clinic and a school.
At sunset we enjoyed the delicacies that Nicolás brought in a well-packaged box from Mexico City, and then, Fernando was able to ask the questions that catapulted us there:
How did you find my aunt's piano?
I met her at the Guadalajara Science Institute, I was looking for a piano. I got what it cost and bought it from him.
And how did you bring it?
It took twelve days to reach Creel and twenty-eight hours to reach Retosachi. It came in a truck full of sacks of potatoes, we took off the legs, stood it upright and held them with them.
That night we listened to Beethoven and the fluttering of the Rarámuris butterflies turned into music. We slept in sleeping bags next to the piano.
Those hands also played, in Los Mochis, my maternal grandparents' piano that my aunt Claribel Gastélum inherited for her virtuosity in playing it.
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