Help a blogger out, Part 2

** As previously mentioned, I am applying for a writing internship of sorts. Based on input from yourselves and my non-text-based friends, I've put together the following blend of two previous blog posts. Let me know what you think! Kill paragraph two? Vary your vocabulary in the intro? Come up with a better bridge? I want to know what I can do to make this piece polished. Thanks to anyone who'll leave me a little constructive criticism in the comments! **

When I am delayed by some street occurrence and find myself walking home around eight or nine at night, there is a flute playing over Cerro Alegre. The location of this lonely-voiced musician is indeterminable. It is clear that it comes to me from somewhere higher up on the hill, because the sound seems to be falling down from the sky. They are eerie and beautiful, these strange little unaccompanied melodies. The air at night, now that it is autumn, is crisp and clear and the notes of the flute echo these qualities. The flutist never falls fully into song, instead sending out smoke signals, little snatches of melody. Eight bars, sixteen bars, pause. Then follows another cadence, unrelated, it seems. The notes are random, a spread pattern like broken glass, and yet all are glinting. Never does a tone fall flat, never does the clear ringing sound break into a breathy split note. This sky of sound is the layer between Neruda’s sky, shattered with stars, and the chaotic but harmonic Bartok composition that is my city. My thoughts unclench and my mind falls into dreams and poetry. I begin to think that there should always be someone playing the flute on clear autumn nights when the stars are out, and Valparaiso's lights are falling into the ocean.

From the ethereal and chill notes of the night, I arrive into the warmth of my home and the privacy of my room. Here, there is an entirely different kind of music, far from the stars and the cold purity of autumn. There is a man, whom I have never seen, whose experience unfolds daily directly below the floorboards of my room. This building, built into the hill, opens into many spaces, and so while I enter from a pasaje that runs between buildings, this man most likely enters from one of the doors that run the grade of our slope of this hill. It is unlikely that I will ever know who it is whose life I can overhear as I fall asleep. I can guess that he is young because of his voice, the race-car video games whose soundtracks invade my space, and the fact that his most active periods fall between two and five am. Whoever he is, my downstairs neighbor loves to sing. Through the thin wood, he sings me endless gospels, ballads, sometimes pop music or the occasional musical score. He does not sing the way that most people sing when they are puttering around at home--halfway, one lyric here, another there, with half a voice. Nervous about the opening of a door or the angry banging on the wall from next door, we sing in showers, sing in the car, hoping not to offend, hoping to sneak under the radar. This neighbor of mine sings as if he had an audience of 50 people. Accordingly, he gives what deserve to be called concerts. An hour or more will pass, full of resonant sound, deep baritone from below pierced by seagull cries from above. I like to listen, and I like to think about the other listeners propped up on other beds or leaned over other tables. It is an anonymous community, the singer and his audience, hidden away in cubby holes, blind to one another.

Outside, on top of the hill, the flute is cold and beautiful and still. Inside, the lone ballad singer is the warm heart of the building. And down in the flat cusp of the city at the base of the hill, in Plaza Anibal Pinto, a man bangs on a homemade bass drum while a girl dances with a tambourine and six, seven, now eight people play on panflutes and mouth-harps, and the rest dance.


Morning breaks. The midnight singer is catching up on his rest, but I am quickly moving around between my brush and closet and bag. With a class to be taught at eight am, I am out the door at seven. This would never happen by my own design, but it is a surprising gift in my days.

Outside, it is blurry silence and the click of the bolt seems loud. Between two buildings, through a rusting iron railing, I look down onto the port. It is coated in mist and fog this early. Soon the sun will burn it clear, but for now it is all in haze. At the bottom of my stairway-street, the street cleaner who works my neighborhood is taking his cigarette break. The smell of the smoke mingles with the damp sea air. Twice a week, we see each other here, a reassuring clockwork. He is doubtless well into his shift; I am pulling on sweater ends and yanking wet hair around as I stumble into my day. All over the city, the street-cleaners are awake and working silently with their brooms and mops and trash cans. The streets never seem to get any cleaner, but it's not for lack of trying.

Valparaiso is soft and sleepy in the morning. I walk through pink half-light. Two old men in wool suits push and pull until they succeed in heaving open a store's metal security paneling. Uniformed children walk to school, chattering quietly like birds. Men wait to buy their newspapers and cigarettes at the kiosks that glow like the lanterns they resemble. The streetlights, determined to fulfill every moment of their service, glow on ever less strikingly against the lightening sky.

The rumbling beasts that constitute Valparaiso's fleet of micros are not yet quite awake. A scant few scream past and are absorbed again into the quiet, exhaust puffing from rusted pipes to join the sea fog. Seagulls are the only other jarring noise. Conversations seem muted. Suited businessmen and vendors pushing carts walk haphazardly through the empty streets.

It is a temporary, tenuous tranquility. The light hits the top of the hills first. It shines off of windows and brings the brightly colored houses back to life, and then it begins to creep down into the Plan.

This is not a sedate city. It is a humming city, a pushing-and-shoving city, a city of shouts and drums and motors. No one who finds themselves falling for this place would wish it to be any other way. But there is a beauty in the contrast that I find in the early morning. Even the murals seem to have their eyes closed, waiting for day to break.

Falling in love with a new city is like falling in love with a person. Walking through Valparaiso in the morning, I am lying propped up with one elbow on the pillow, hair tousled. As the light slowly wakes the cerros and creeps down towards the water, I am biting my lip, softly touching a still cheek or a slowly rising chest, thinking, He is so beautiful when he sleeps. Thinking, Wake up. Don't wake up. Wake up.