MargenI've spent forty years tuning pianos, and I've learned to tell what a house carries by how its piano sounds. There are happy-house pianos, worn by cheerful use, their middle keys yellowed like a smoker's teeth. There are punishment pianos, perfect and mute, that no child ever wanted. And there are grief pianos. You know them at once: tuned on the outside and broken on the inside, like the people who inherit them.
Mrs. Roure's piano was the third kind. A German upright, good wood, sixty years worn well. The door was opened by a small, very neatly combed woman, the kind who makes coffee for a tradesman's visit even when the visit has come to fix a tap.
—It was my husband's —she said, and the past tense needed no help: the whole house conjugated it.
I worked for a good hour. The piano was worse than it looked: years of not being played put a piano further out of tune than years of use, because the wood grows used to silence. When I finished I did what I always do: a few scales, a few chords, a courtesy waltz to show my work.
—Perfect —she said from the kitchen doorway, tea towel in her hands—. Now put the B flat back out of tune for me.
I thought I had misheard. She repeated it: the B flat in the second octave, a little flat. The way it was.
—Madam, that B flat has been sagging for years. It's one of the things I came to fix.
—I know —she said—. But Tomás played it that way. Forty years hearing him stumble on the same note, in the same pasacalle, every Sunday morning. I'd say: Tomás, that B flat. And he'd say: it's the piano. And it wasn't the piano, it was his ring finger, which came up short after a fracture in his youth. —She folded the towel in four, with great care—. If you leave the piano perfect, when my granddaughter plays it won't sound like him anymore. It will sound like a good piano, which is all very well. But I'm past the age for good pianos. I want my Sunday.
I could have explained to her what my trade was. That I'm paid for order, for exact frequencies, for leaving every string in its place. That in forty years nobody had ever asked me to spoil a note on purpose.
I lowered the B flat an eighth of a tone. I checked it three times, with more care than I put into tuning: untuning with precision is fiendishly hard, because someone else's mistake is an exact note that appears in no manual.
I played the pasacalle as best I could, by ear. And on the second bar, when the note stumbled where it had always stumbled, I heard behind me a small, domestic, incomparable sound: a laugh with tears inside, the kind that does both things at once because the body can't keep up.
—There he is —said Mrs. Roure—. There's the clumsy one.
I didn't charge for the visit. She paid me with coffee and with something I didn't know I was missing: the certainty that my trade is not tuning pianos. It's tuning houses. And there are houses that, to sound right, need exactly one broken note.