[Free Time - Siegfried]
I was just about to leave my room when I heard something through the wall… someone singing. I listened for a few seconds, confused, until I remembered that my next door neighbor was the Ultimate Operatic Tenor. It was weirder that I hadn’t heard him sing yet.
I hesitated at his door, not wanting to interrupt the music. It was just scales and arpeggios, I knew that much from my short time in piano lessons, but he could make them sound like the most incredible showstopper aria…
The singing stopped for a moment, and I took advantage of the silence to knock quietly. Siegfried frowned as he answered the door.
That was a… less antagonistic response than it could’ve been? I guess it’s tough to get tone across when you’re speaking in your third or fourth language. But I still didn’t expect this kind of a reaction from the guy who’d been soaking up compliments like a sponge from Sal yesterday.
He looked genuinely surprised, but he opened the door for me to shuffle inside.
His room was extremely clean and orderly, and the shelves in the walls were filled with books, like mine. Instead of novels, though, they were librettos for dozens of operas– The Magic Flute, Barber of Seville, Lohengrin, Otello, and many more I’d never heard of before. I sat in the desk chair, figuring he probably stood up to practice anyway.
He seemed a little nervous about my presence, and wouldn’t look at me as he began to sing, instead checking his posture carefully in the mirror on the closet door. Once he got started, though, he slowly lost himself in the music as his voice soared through warmup after warmup.
I got lost in it too– when he stopped suddenly and turned to look at me, it felt like someone had shoved me awake from a nice dream.
He flinched, almost as if I had slapped him.
So he wasn’t fishing for compliments… he really meant every awful thing he’d said about himself. I didn’t get it. He sang like an angel!
