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 shoulder, 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:
‘Your father, when he talked about or thought about pianos, he had whirligigs of music inside him.’
During those days my uncle sent me many times to the piano cemetery. At first he’d point out the piece he needed — a damper, a lever spring, a knob — and then would hide his face inside the piano again. The first few times my mother’s voice, repeated by memory, would come back to say those words to me from when I was a child and I spoke to her of that closed door in my workshop. Later, bit by bit, I began to convince myself of my uncle’s words:
‘Your father would have been so happy, if he was here.’
And I began to believe that, whatever my mother’s idea — to protect me, to protect my father’s memory — I would be honouring her because I was giving new life to my father’s dreams, just as I was giving new lives to the dead pieces of those pianos.
Sometimes I took a little longer than was necessary because I stopped to listen to the calm, or to look at the pianos that surrounded me and imagine the story that each one of them held — wooden stages, dances, instructors teaching, girls with lace cuffs learning. When I returned to the shop my uncle never noticed the delay and smiled at me as I held out the correct piece he had requested.
Early on Saturday afternoon we looked at one another with a shy satisfaction when we knew the piano was ready. Mid-morning my uncle had gone out to fetch the tuner. He arrived, leading him by the arm. The tuner was blind. He tilted his head upwards or to places where nothing was happening. His head turned independently on his neck. He was older than my uncle. He had smooth hands. He spoke little. We spent hours setting each note right. The tuner tightened the strings with a silver key that he held, tightly and carefully, between his fingers. And the pure sounds — distinct in the silence — drawn in the air, lingering briefly, echoing in the memory and leaving another silence — another silence — another, different silence.
When there was a word to be heard, at last, it was my uncle asking me to go and tell the Italian. I smiled at him, I nodded, but couldn’t say anything because, inside me, there was an infinite whirligig of infinite music.