Friendship is for Sharing

(Manuel Hipólito Soler)

My name is Bart Polley. I am thirty two years old, and this is my story about how I found my place in the world and built my happiness thanks to music.

When I was a kid I used to have problems at school, but not with grades. I remember that I almost always had fights with my classmates. However, far away from all that social pressure, my grades were quite good.

Anyway, I have always enjoyed listening to music. I love many rock and heavy metal bands from my country like Queen, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols and Iron Maiden. I also like pop music very much; especially classical greatest hits like those from Michael Jackson, Laura Branigan and the Swedish band ABBA. However, what I have always listened to a lot is classical music and Latin American and Spanish folk music.

All my love for classical music was something that I got thanks to my parents and my grandpas. As regards Latin American folk music, but especially Argentinean, I remember that when I was fourteen I could travel to Argentina with my family. It was a very interesting holiday. It was the only time when I could travel abroad.

At the very beginning I wasn’t thrilled because I thought I would have preferred travelling to Brazil or Mexico, but my experiences there at certain points were like the beginning of where I am now.

Although all the problems related to the so-called Falkland Islands war which happened much time ago during the eighties, the Argentineans seemed to be very nice people with us. At least with me and my family they were very kind.

We had enough money to visit more places apart from Buenos Aires, and so we did. For example, we went to a little town called Azul, where we really enjoyed the beautiful landscape of the Municipal Park Domingo Faustino Sarmiento.

There in Azul, I remember that I met an Argentinean boy called Santiago Ramirez, who was my first foreigner friend and I think that one of my first true friends. He taught me more Spanish and talked to me about many historical and cultural aspects of Argentina and also Latin America in general. Thanks to him I met some rock bands from that country like Callejeros and Soda Stereo, along with some folk music bands and singers like Horacio Guarani and Tamara Castro.

He was a bookworm like me, and he was really interested in things like the history of the gauchos. He helped me to improve my Spanish, and I could learn about the gauchos and much literature like Martín Fierro by José Hernandez, though actually I only could read some summaries because of the strange and “gaucho-like” way it was written.

I remember that after such wonderful days there in Argentina, I almost started to cry when we had to go to the airport to return to England. Time passed, so I continued growing up. When I left my parents and began my whole adult life, I decided to move near to the forest. I found it wonderful. It was beautiful, for example, when I listened to the singing of the birds, and all the landscape reminded me of that municipal park in that Argentinean town.

One night, after a really busy day at work, I was listening to the radio. There were a lot of bad news about the possibility of a Third World War coming. I got a bit depressed when I heard that, because it also reminded me about other abroad affairs like the crisis in Argentina. I thought about Santiago and his family. Yes, even if I had already lost contact with him so many years before, I thought of him.

Before going to sleep, I heard a strange noise. However, I ignored it because I was really tired and sleepy. The next day, after work, I listened to more strange noises. They seemed to come from the forest. The days passed and I tried to be more focused in work but those strange noises had caught me. I began to have a certain fear. I started to dislike the forest. Meanwhile, the bad news went on and on, so I got quite depressed. I couldn’t sleep at night, because I began to think too much about different things like all the problems from the present and all the bad things that happened to me in the past.

Finally, one weekend I decided to do something weird. I picked up a torch and I went to walk a little into the forest. Then I saw them. I remember that I was walking when I heard a species of wolf howl, so I turned around and I saw two strange and dark humanoid beings. They were werewolves. I ran like hell really scared but I stumbled and I fell.

When I could get up again, they were in front of me. Then I could see that one of those two black fur werewolves was female because I saw that she wore a species of bodice made of rags. Both wore a rag skirt. I was going to scream and cry of fear when suddenly the male monster talked to me.

“Hello, my name is Johnny and she is my sister Karen, how are you? Are you ok?” he said. I told them my name and I asked them what they were doing. Of course I was really shocked and I couldn’t believe that it was all real and not a nightmare. They told me that I had nothing to fear because they didn’t eat human flesh, and that they only wanted some safe place to stay because they were afraid of the war.

“How can you know about war? I mean, about human war and things like planes which drop bombs?” I asked them. They said that during many years, werewolves lived peacefully without any problem with human beings like me, except during war time or when humans met them.

Karen began to cry while her brother lowered his head. At that moment, I thought of calming them with some music. I showed them my mobile phone and I played some music. It was moving but at the same time funny because they were like kids, because I could calm them with a Fred Astaire song, the so-called Cheek to Cheek. They loved it.

Time passed, and on the weekends at night I went to visit them. We became friends. I gave them the nicknames of “Lupito” and “Lupita”. I talked to them and shown them much more music, such as classical music like The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi, the wonderful piano in Chopin’s Nocturnes, Argentinian folk music like the guitar of Roberto Lara and different songs of other people like Los Chalchaleros, peaceful Baroque guitar music, and more orchestral music like films and videogames soundtrack.

One night, I decided to invite them to my house. It was Saturday. I turned on the radio and I played one of my old mixtapes CDs which I continued having, though I almost never listened to them. We were having dinner together with music. After the Waltz of the Flowers by Tchaikovsky, the song Pegasus Bridge from the soundtrack of the video game Call of Duty began to be played.

Lupita was really moved by listening to that song. I could see how her eyes dropped little tears. She told me that I was their best friend and their only human friend, because they had always tended to avoid humans like me because of things like violence, war and prejudices. Actually, werewolves like them were peaceful. They didn’t fight within them, they didn’t attack human beings, and they only killed deers to eat.

“We needed more company, both my brother and I”, she told me. “It’s ok; you will always be welcomed here. You know? Once I had a friend called Santiago who told me that friendship is for sharing” I answered.

So, since that night most weekends I have invited them home. Most weekends we have shared everything. I have gifted them some old clothes to wear. They have made me company. We have had many dinners enjoying the music, mainly beautiful classical and orchestral music, along with the gorgeous Argentinian folklore and Spanish flamenco too.

Many people would be scared of creatures like them, but you know? Sometimes looks are deceiving, because the true beauty tends to be actually something which is inside in our hearts. They may look scary but they have a great heart. We have been, and we are, best friends.

*Soundtrack of this short story*

1) Cheek to Cheek by Fred Astaire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1u2G16fq_Y

2) The Four Seasons by Antonio Lucio Vivaldi.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DBIR30ks64

3) The Nocturnes by Frédéric Chopin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blga9Bmz97A&t=3s

4) Roberto Lara’s guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DL5LZDDDdc

5) Peaceful Baroque guitar music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uY5FKYCaUo

6) Waltz of the Flowers by Tchaikovsky.