...of an avante-garde composition

...Berthe Trepat looked at the audience once more, all the sins of the moon suddenly seemed concentrated in her face that appeared to be covered with flour, and her cherry-red mouth opened up to assume the shape of an Egyptian barge. Profile once again, her little parrot-beak nose pointed for a moment at the keyboard while her hands perched on the keys from C to B like two dried-up chamois bags. The thirty-two chords of the first discontinuous movement began to sound. There were five seconds between the first and the second, fifteen between the second and third. On arriving at the fifteenth chord, Rose Bob had decided on a pause of twenty-five seconds. Oliveira, who at first had appreciated the good Weberian use of silence that Rose Bob was utilising in her pauses, noticed that overuse was rapidly dissipating the effect. Between chords 7 and 8 there was coughing, between 12 and 13 somebody struck a match noisily, between 14 and 15 he clearly heard the expression "Ah, merde alors!" contributed by a young blonde girl. Around the twentieth chord one of the more ancient ladies, a real virginal pickle, gripped her umbrella and opened her mouth to say something that was mercifully swallowed up by the twenty-first chord. Amused, Oliveira looked at Berthe Trepat, suspecting that the pianist was studying them all with what is called the corner of her eye. Out of that corner of the hook-nosed profile of Berthe Trepat a celestial grey glance seemed to come, and it occurred to Oliveira that probably the poor woman was counting the house. At chord 23 a man with a neat, round bald spot got up indignantly and after snorting and huffing left the hall, digging in his heels during the eight-second silence ordained by Rose Bob. After chord 24 the pauses began to get smaller, and between 28 and 32 there was a rhythm like that of a dirge which could not help but have some effect...

[Hopscotch, Cortazar, J.]