Illustration by Adam De Souza
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When I returned to our apartment dragging a bulky, blue suitcase, my roommate raised an eyebrow.
I snapped open the latches and cracked the lid to reveal the polished black instrument. It’s an accordion, I said.
With its faux-chrome accents, it looked like a classic car compressed into a cube. It smelled like an attic.
It sure is, he said.
It had been, I’ll admit it, a spontaneous purchase, one that might have had something to do with the solitude of grad school. Holed up for hours at a carrel desk, trying to piece together disparate ideas, you begin to crave more concrete forms of connection.
So when a friend posted his accordion for sale, naturally, I saw it as a remedy for my loneliness.
I was 22 and knew little, except that I had just spent half a month’s rent on an instrument with a reputation as a kind of joke.
That summer, still hunched at a computer, I struggled to breathe life into a tired thesis. Desperate for distraction, I began to practise my new instrument. In its buttons I discovered satisfying patterns and, in the touch of its plastic keys, an ease lacking in my sentences. The accordion was logical, dependable and I savoured the process of unlocking its codes.
As my playing improved (and my productivity worsened), I grew comfortable playing with an open window. Once, I overheard a couple pass by on the sidewalk. “Listen,” a woman said to her companion, ignorant of their status as my first audience. “It’s an accordion.” (I may have been failing at school, but was passing, it seemed, as an accordéoniste.)
Like all instruments, the accordion is an object of potential. Its hidden reeds depend on the movement of air to awaken resonant properties.
There is, of course, a certain romance to an object lying dormant for decades, awaiting inspiration, the flow of air to give it life, to make it sing.
Summer turned to fall, fall to winter. At Christmas, I travelled home to visit my grandmother. The accordion accompanied me on the journey, the blue case a standout in the Greyhound’s luggage compartment.
My grandmother was dying. At her bedside I played her favourite French carol, Ça berger, about shepherds who gather to investigate rumours of new life in the night. She sang weakly of the shepherds’ joyful commitment: “Accordons, dans nos concerts,” they proclaim. “Faisons retentir les airs.”
Only later would I notice the second T in what I’d misread as retenir (“to hold back”), a single letter which yields a new and opposite meaning: “to ring out.” As a child, listening to my grandmother sing these lines, I’d imagined the old shepherds holding their breath in the night, when in fact they were calling on us to make our songs resound.
At the end of our visit – it would be our last – I packed the accordion and placed a kiss on her forehead. We said goodbye and I was reminded of the inescapable alone-ness of dying.
When I became a high-school teacher, I hid the blue case in a classroom cupboard. Teens would be too tough a crowd for an instrument synonymous with polka and suspenders. The accordion, I reasoned, was the antithesis of trendy.
But teens, similar to the accordion itself, can, too, readily be misjudged. Once, when one of my lessons was tanking, I unboxed the instrument and watched them look up from their phones. My students, I’ve discovered, react to the accordion no differently than they would upon seeing, say, a moose. They recognize it, but have never seen one IRL.
“Play Hotline Bling,” one student requested, so I did. “Can I try?” another asked, so she did. She slid her arms through the leather straps like a reversed backpack and commented on its heaviness. “Sir,” another said, “we should perform for the seniors.”
So we did. Our setlist included Adele’s Someone Like You and Bill Withers’s Lean on Me. We sang Happy Birthday for a woman turning 100. Our afternoon concert at the nearby nursing home remains a career highlight.
Ten years after that first impulse purchase, I made another. This time, it was a flight to France, where I would hunker for the month in a friend’s old rural farmhouse to write a book.
Once again I found myself hunched at a laptop. Though this time the words and ideas flowed, the familiar solitude soon returned. So when the neighbour, a gentle-natured octogenarian named Pépette, invited me into her home, I accepted without hesitation.
Over tea, she told the story of her brother who fell at Dunkirk. She spoke of her childhood in the village during the occupation, of the SS tapping her bedroom window with the butt of their pistols. And of the anxiety that prevents her, even today, from leaving the house after dark.
At my mention of being a musician, Pépette disappeared and returned a moment later with a dusty suitcase. She did not have to tell me what it contained.
“It belonged to my husband,” she said. “It would please me if you played it.”
I declined out of respect, but she insisted. So I lifted the instrument onto my lap and slid the cracked leather straps onto my shoulders. And I began to play, its buttons at once foreign and familiar beneath my fingers.
Outside her kitchen window, a pale winter light was falling. Pépette hummed tunes for my imitation.
When it was time to go, I thanked my new friend and helped her snap shut the dusty case. We returned it to the closet where it had sat for years. And where, I mused, it would await its next breath, whenever that might be.
Then I stepped out into the night, buoyed by our spontaneous concert, and inhaled deeply. The air was cold and pleasant. My breath rose in silver curls against the sky, which was not still, I realized, but resonating.
Eric Démoré lives in Toronto.