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and the spies are in the habit of gazing up at the house through binoculars. They have no intention of putting their own house in order first. Indeed, they completely neglect their house when the vacationers finally come from the city, because it is summer now. A brook trickles through a meadow. A large hazelnut bush abruptly slices off any further view of the brook, which flows invisibly into the meadow belonging to the next farmer. To the left of the house, a mountain meadow climbs high, ending in a forest, part of which is private property, and the rest national. All around, dense pine forests hem in the view; but you can still see what your neighbor is doing, and he can see what you’re doing. Cows trudge along the trail to the pastures. In back, to the left, an open pile of charcoal; and to the right a clearing, and a strawberry patch. Overhead, clouds, birds, including hawks and buzzards.
    The hawk mother and the buzzard grandmother order the child, their charge, not to leave the eyrie. They cut off HER life in thick slices, and the neighbors are already snipping away at HER character. Every stratum in which life still stirs, if only slightly, is declared rotten and slashed away. Too much strolling is bad for your studies. Down there, at the weir, young men are splashing around. SHE feels drawn to them. They laugh loudly and duck under. SHE could shine there, among the country bumpkins. She has been trained to shine. She has been drilled, she has been taught that she is the sun, the center of all orbits. She only has to stand still, and the satellites will come and worship her. She knows she is better because that iswhat she is always told. But it’s better not to examine her assumption.
    Reluctantly, the violin finally moves under her chin, heaved up by an unwilling arm. Outdoors, the sun is smiling, the water beckoning. The sun lures you into undressing in front of others, something the old ladies in the house have ordered her not to do. Her fingers press the painful steel strings down the fingerboard. Mozart’s tormented spirit, moaning and choking, is forced out of the resonator. Mozart’s spirit shrieks from an infernal abode because the violinist feels nothing, but she has to keep enticing the notes. Shrieking and groaning, the notes squirm out of the instrument. SHE does not need to fear criticism, so long as something can be heard, for the sounds indicate that the child has ascended the scale, to reach loftier spheres, while leaving her body down below as a dead frame. The daughter’s physical remains, sloughed off in her ascent, are combed for any traces of male use and then thoroughly shaken. After completing the music, she can slip back into her mortal coils, which have been nicely dried and starched crisp and stiff. Her frame is now unfeeling, and no one has the right to feel it.
    Mother makes a cutting remark: If SHE were left to her own devices, SHE would show more enthusiasm for some young man than for her piano-playing. The piano has to be tuned every year, for this raw Alpine climate quickly thwarts the finest tuning. The piano tuner arrives on the train from Vienna. He pants his way up the mountain, where some lunatics claim they’ve got a grand piano, three thousand feet above sea level! The tuner prophesizes that this instrument can be worked for another year or two; by then, rust and rot and mildew will have gobbled it up in unison. Mother makes sure the piano is kept properly tuned; and she also keeps twisting her daughter’s vertebrae, unconcerned about the child’s mood, worrying solelyabout her own influence on this stubborn, easily deformable, living instrument.
    Mother insists on keeping the windows wide open when the child “plays a recital” (that sweet reward for practicing nicely). This way, the neighbors too can delight in the dulcet melodies. Mother and Grandmother, armed with binoculars, stand on their lofty vantage point, checking whether the nearby farmer’s wife and all her