It was my father who left the workshop to me. Some days, when I was coming back from the market holding my mother’s hand, I would ask her:
‘Let’s go to my workshop.’
If someone heard me and understood, they’d laugh, with me so small talking like that. My mother didn’t laugh because she had been the one who had taught me to use those words.
My father died far away from my mother, exhausted, on the same day that I was born.
Throughout my childhood, on certain evenings, my mother would boil a pan of water and ask me to go out to the yard to fetch a leaf from the lemon tree. Our lemon tree had large, thick leaves, hard to detach and noisy as I tore them from the lower branches. My mother would wash the leaf and submerge it in the boiling water to make our tea. It was at that moment that she would bring to the middle of the table a parcel wrapped in brown paper which, very slowly, under my gaze, she would open. In it were two cakes she had bought from the bakery and which she would cut in half with the tip of her knife. I’d get up on to a stool and take two mugs out of the cupboard. We would sit at the table, mother and son, eating our halves of cake and drinking tea. Then my mother would tell stories that always ended with my father’s laughter. My mother almost always laughed when she described my father’s laughter. Then my mother would say that my father was priceless.
Then a pause. Silence. And my mother would tell me how, without any doubt, my father would have been proud to know that I was going to look after the workshop. That was the moment she would speak of my workshop:
‘Your workshop,’ she’d say, serious, looking me in the eye. My mother’s voice was fragile and secure, it was gentle, it was firm.
The workshop remained out of action until the day my uncle offered to take care of it, paying the small rent with which my mother managed things. There were months in which my uncle, through confusion or through drink, was late paying. My mother counted on this, and for just such occasions she would save a little money at the bottom of her sewing box. It rarely happened that, after his deadlines had passed, she had to go, determined, up the two blocks separating our house from the workshop to claim the rent. When my uncle saw her arrive, he would be ashamed; he’d lower his face, beg a thousand heartfelt apologies and, almost always, weep.
I started working with my uncle a few days after turning twelve. During my apprenticeship I tried to make out what he was telling me to do from amid the torrent of incomprehensible stories he would tell me. What my uncle had to teach me was the little he had learned from watching his father working and what he had learned from his own mistakes and attempts. At fourteen, I was already more perfect in my work than he was, and I taught him things he had never known, or that he had forgotten.
I was fourteen when my mother fell ill. In a week every bone and every vein in her body became visible. Her skin yellowed. Her gaze remained fixed on a certain point. I begged her not to die. I asked her, begged her by everything. But a few weeks passed, and she died.
It was as though she had only been waiting to see me raised.
The following weeks my uncle remained in silence. One morning he began to tell a story which never came to an end, and time continued to pass.
Absorbed in the stories he himself was telling, my uncle would rarely hear people arriving with heavy tread on the earth floor of the entrance, people who would appear at any hour to commission work or see if the work they had commissioned was ready. So he would be surprised to see them appear at the shop door. He would circle them, thrilled, speaking to them loudly and smiling. These people, even if they didn’t know him, ignored him and made straight for me. That was exactly what happened the morning the Italian arrived.
The fine moustache danced over his lips to the rhythm of the words he was saying. As he spoke, the fine moustache, waxed, assumed the most varied shapes: a tilde, a line, a right angle, a curve. At the same time he used his clean, smooth, white hands, his slender, well-tended fingers with their slightly long nails, to gesture and thus to sculpt the air before him into all manner of shapes: a noble horse with silver harnesses, halls with engravings on the ceiling, a piano. Then sometimes he would stop abruptly to check whether we had understood, and straighten his cuff buttons with the tips of his fingers or pluck at the bright collars of his morning-coat. Then he would decide that we had not understood him, and he would continue.
But we had understood everything. Everything, perhaps. From the moment the Italian started speaking, my uncle’s voice faded away, weaker, weaker, as though going down a flight of stairs, until he fell completely silent, and with his left eye wide remained just listening with lively and genuine interest. When the Italian became tired, or when he simply no longer knew how to explain himself, my uncle and I looked at one another to confirm that we had understood. The Italian played and sang at dances. He had a broken piano and someone had told him that we would be able to repair it here.
With the Italian between us, we crossed the carpentry shop and the entrance hall, walked as far as the street, and there on a cart pulled by a pair of tired mules was a grand piano, reflecting the clouds in its black sheen, held down by the ropes. Before I could say anything, my uncle looked at the Italian and held out his hand, gravely saying:
‘You can count on us to get your piano repaired in time to play at the dance.’
The Italian ignored my uncle’s hand, smiled and, turning towards me, said that the dance would be on Saturday night. We had three days. I turned to my uncle to discuss the decision, but I was halted in the middle of my first word for he had already turned his back and, skirting round the puddles of oil from the moped mechanic who had a workshop a little further up the road, was walking hurriedly towards the taberna. Mutely I looked at the Italian and shrugged my shoulders in a moment of shared incomprehension, but with the same haste my uncle emerged from the taberna, leading a group of men — ragged men, unsteady men, old men, crooked men and cripples.
Under my uncle’s orders, the men began to untie the piano. It was my uncle who opened the big workshop doors completely, and who got up on to the cart and began gently to push the piano, which slid on its little wheels into the arms of the men.
‘Hang on there.’ And he got down to help them.
My uncle counted to three and, with a sound from deep inside his chest, said, ‘Hup. .’ At that moment they lifted the piano higher and took shuffling steps that dragged the sound of the dust on the ground. They carried the piano as though they were carrying the whole world. The men’s bodies, clutching the piano, and their legs, bent under the weight, were a black animal, like a spider. Their voices, stifled by the weight — don’t let go now, push towards your left — surrounded the piano. They crossed the entrance hall to the workshop and headed towards the carpentry shop. There were men who went in backwards and others, going forwards, who raised their heads to direct them.
As they disappeared through the door to the carpentry shop, the Italian handed me a card — the Flor de Benfica boarding house. I was still looking at the card when the Italian held out his hand. I offered him mine and he, quickly, squeezed my wrist and shook my arm. He smiled broadly, wiped the polish of his shoes on the back of his trouser legs, climbed up on to the cart and, with a word of Italian to the mules, set off up the road.
When the men came out, as though they had seen the whole world between the walls of the carpentry shop, they disguised their efforts with a smile and clapped their hands together as though cleaning off the dust, wiped their hands on their stained trouser-legs as though cleaning them. My uncle came with them, leading the thread of their voices. He came out with them through the doorway, and they all skirted past me as though I was invisible, took some steps down the dirt road and went into the taberna. My uncle rested his elbows on the marble counter and bought each of the men a glass of wine.
It was still morning. I was alone, standing in the street, at the open door to the workshop. I held my arms straight down against my body and an abandoned card in one of my hands.
Fragments of wind brought the ringing of bells chiming distant hours. I was twenty-two years old, my arms were straight down against my body, I had never repaired a piano and couldn’t imagine myself capable of doing it.
At the living-room door it was as though my wife had stopped, though without actually stopping, because for a single moment an image — complete and clear — was suspended there in front of her: little Íris, sitting, her mouth open in a continuous scream, surrounded by pieces of broken glass, tumbled-over jugs, headless china dolls, sitting beside the corner cupboard, which was tumbled on the rug like an old corpse fallen face-down; and Íris holding up her hand, open, the palm of her hand covered in blood that ran between her fingers. In three steps, with pieces of glass crunching under the soles of her slippers, my wife picks her up under her arms and lifts her into the air. Our granddaughter’s cries tear the landscapes printed in the pictures on the walls; they cut my wife’s face and stop her from breathing.
‘There now, there now,’ she says, as she turns on the bathroom tap over Íris’s hand, but the girl’s cries are reflected in the rust-stained mirror and the white bathroom tiles.
The telephone starts to ring. Over the pine table — the drawer of scrawled papers and ballpoint pens that don’t write — over the lace doily; my wife’s godmother choosing balls of thread at the silk merchant’s — by the chrome-plated frame — the photograph we all took together in Rossio — the telephone screams. Strong as iron, it stretches out with a persistent urgency, which stops to catch its breath, then carries on again with the same panic and the same authority.
The telephone continues to ring. Íris cries and screams. Tears draw hot streaks on her red cheeks. My wife holds her hand under the open tap. The blood is diluted on the cracked washbasin porcelain and disappears. In the palm of Íris’s hand a splinter of glass buried in a wound. In a single movement, my wife pulls it out with the tips of her fingers and feels the inside of her flesh.
‘There now, there now,’ she says, bringing her hand back under the cold water. Íris’s cries make the white light of the bulb hanging from a cable turn strident, they make the little bottles of lotions arranged on a shelf tremble, and as they enter the bathtub they scratch the surface of the enamel with squeals.
The telephone continues to ring. Each ring is a hand that grabs my wife’s body and squeezes it, that grabs her head and squeezes it, that grabs her heart and squeezes it. In her arms, Íris’s voice begins to find some comfort, and, slowly, some peace. My wife turns off the tap, wraps Íris’s hand in a white towel from the bidet and, holding her in her arms, runs out of the bathroom and down the corridor.
The telephone continues to ring. My wife’s steps are quick on the carpet because usually nobody rings during the day. She fears, inside, that it is bad news, she fears it is news that will floor her, that will destroy her, that will condemn her again — death. She squeezes the girl to her breast and moves anxiously across the carpet — as fast as she is able. And the telephone stops ringing. My wife’s steps lose their meaning, they diminish and stop.
In the kitchen, the piano music is still being born from the wireless and is pushed by the wind that comes in through the open window.
I didn’t want to say anything to my uncle, because I wanted to see the result of his enthusiasm. He encircled the piano with words and steps that, all of a sudden, would change direction. At a distance, my arms crossed over my chest, I watched him and I didn’t believe anything he said. In the sawdust that covered the floor an irregular shape had been sketched, which was the track my uncle was following. On impulse he broke off from this flow of marked steps and went to fetch a little stool — covered in splashes of paint and bent nails — which he brushed off and placed in front of the piano. He sat down, lifted the lid that covered the keyboard and ran his gaze over it. Almost moved, he said:
‘Your father would have been so happy, if he was here.’
That was the moment everything made sense for me. My father. Like a finger on a key rousing a hammer from its slumber, I understood.
At the entrance to the workshop, to the right, there was a closed door, covered up by time and by chairs that were missing a leg, by tabletops and other remains that had been accumulating into a disordered heap. That afternoon my uncle and I moved everything away, and since we had no idea about where the key was it was left to me to break down the door with two kicks to the lock.
The piano cemetery. My mother avoided talking about this closed-off section of the workshop. Whenever she did, she said there wasn’t anything there that would be of interest to me. When this explanation ceased to be sufficient, she spoke to me of frights. She said:
‘There are some real frights in there.’
Aged ten, this explanation was enough for me. Then summers and winters passed. I stopped asking questions. There was a closed door at the entrance to the workshop, slowly covered over with boards, with bits of junk, and I didn’t think about it. I thought about other things.
That afternoon we remained standing a moment at this suddenly open door. There, inside, absolute darkness covered all the shapes. It was as though we had opened a door into the night. In front of us, in the darkness of the piano cemetery, there could be fields covered by the night, or a river covered by the night, or a whole city — asleep or dead — covered by the night.
My uncle went in first. I could no longer see him among the shadows of the shadows — a shape among shapes. He knew the way, and it took only a few steps, a few mysterious sounds in the darkness, until with the sleeve of his sweater he had begun to clean the pane of the little dust-covered window. Through his movements, rays of light came in.
Slowly, brightness filled the whole piano cemetery. The light slipped across the surfaces of dust. You could barely see the grime on the walls, and the weight of the low ceiling was made much more real because there were pianos of all sorts rising up, in heavy tiers, almost touching the ceiling. Stored against the walls were upright pianos, one on top of another — in the arrangement in which my father, or his father before him, had stacked them. In the middle there were walls of stacked pianos. The light crossed the empty spaces between them, and even from the door it was possible to make out the labyrinth of passageways they were obscuring. And on one grand piano there was another grand piano, smaller and without legs; on this there was an upright piano, lying down; on top of this, a heap of keys. Near by, separated by a slit that the light came through, two upright pianos, the same height, leaning on each other, bore a more solid upright piano that at its top supported a smaller upright. Pianos were crammed in in every possible way. In the gaps where they didn’t completely fit together, the brightness came through abandoned spiders’ webs that held drops of water, points of sheen. The fresh air of the piano cemetery came into our lungs, bringing with it a damp touch of the gummy dust that was the only colour in the room — the smell of a time everyone wanted to forget, but which still existed. This light and ancient colour exuded silence. The light came through the silence. On the ground there were scratched piano lids, upended, leaning on other pianos. In some corners, there were metal rods, keys, pedals and piano-legs bound to one another with wires. Through the space between two pianos, from the little and now lit-up window, my uncle looked at me with a smile. When I looked right at his face, he smiled more, jumped to the ground with a thundering of boots and disappeared between the pianos.
I went in, choosing where I put each foot, as though afraid of something unknown. In the shadows I imagined secrets from a time before I was born, a time from which I would always be excluded — eternity — and which in the same instant became as concrete and simple as the objects I touched every day, like the way from the house to the workshop, like the memories I had and which guided me. Alone, feeling myself being watched by all the chaotically stacked pianos, I moved forwards. I skirted round an upright, and at the end of this new passageway saw my uncle with his arms inside a grand and rushed towards him. He took a step back, put a hand on my sho
ulder, gestured towards the piano’s mechanism with his other hand and said that this was one of the pianos he would be returning to for parts. I looked at him, incredulous, but encountered such confidence that for that moment I stopped doubting that we would be able to fix the piano.
That afternoon, and the following day, and the next, and the Saturday morning, I learned the most important part of what, for my whole life, I was to learn about pianos. Solemnly, my uncle looked straight at me with his left eye when he wanted to explain the points that I should never forget. I nodded my head and paid attention to every one of his words. They remained engraved in me, as though inside me there was a place made of stone waiting to receive the shape of these words’ meaning. In just the same way I paid attention to all the stories my uncle told. When he lost himself in details and began to forget to tell the ending of one of them, I would ask him what had happened after the point at which he had drifted off. He was not surprised at my sudden interest in his stories, and continued.
In the stories that my uncle told in those days, I understood a little more of my own story. My father, like his father before him, had spent years making doors and windows because he couldn’t live on just repairing pianos. When my father wasn’t making doors and windows, he made stools for people to sit on, he made tables hoping that people had soup dishes to place on them; but in all his fantasies, he could hear pianos, as though hearing impossible loves. When he finished repairing a piano, alone, without ever having learned a note, my father would close up the whole workshop in order to play — right in the middle of the carpentry shop — pieces of music he knew and pieces of music he made up. He would perhaps have liked to be a pianist, but even before he had given up on all his dreams he’d not allowed himself dreams of this size. My uncle fixed his left eye on me to be sure that I would never forget, and said:
The Piano Cemetery Page 2
