Food for the soul

We went to buy groceries but found the supermarket closed, probably due to some Spanish holiday that remained unknown to us. So instead of groceries, providence offered us food for the soul. Right in front of the supermarket windows, with roller shutters closed, behind which we could still make out the desired packets of pasta and bottles of wine, we found a stage, and a small brass orchestra on it. The orchestra consisted of only male musicians, all of them so ancient that compared to them their conductor, a man in his forties, with a rather noticeable bald spot, seemed like a schoolboy. He wore sunglasses and a black untucked shirt and resembled the managing director of a local nightclub. His musicians, in suites and bow-ties, were sitting on white plastic chairs in front of him. They were playing with faces so impassive that it seemed that they themselves couldn’t fully comprehend why they got out of bed in the morning today. They had a hard time keeping up with the conductor. One musician started to cough in the middle of the piece and was left behind. Another one tried to fix the sheets of his music book with a peg but his hands were shaking so hard that he couldn’t do it and missed half of the piece. Every now and then almost the whole orchestra would stumble, with just one instrument left to pull the music, until the others could pick up the abandoned piece again. There were two rows of the same plastic chairs in front of the stage, occupied by old ladies in nice dresses. All of them were wearing very bright lipstick. The ladies chatted enthusiastically with each other, paying little attention to what was happening on the stage, until the next piece ended, at which point they would start clapping and shouting, “Bravo, bravo!” without even turning their heads to the stage.