The Seville Repair

The guitar had belonged to my father, who had no talent, and to his father before him, who apparently had some but wasted it. This is the family version. My grandmother told it differently. She said her husband could play beautifully but chose not to, out of spite. Whether this was spite toward the instrument, the audience, or my grandmother specifically, she never clarified. The guitar came to me when my father died, along with a house full of furniture I didn't want, three boxes of fishing magazines he had never read, and a cat named Republica who hated everyone equally and whom I respected for her consistency. I brought the guitar to Delgado's in Triana because it had a crack in the body that ran from the sound hole to the base. Delgado looked at it the way a doctor looks at an X-ray when the news is not going to be simple. "This is old," he said. "1962." "The crack is old too. Someone glued it." He held it to the light. "Badly. And then someone glued it again, also badly. And then someone put tape on it." "My father." "The tape." "All of it, probably." Delgado set the guitar down on his bench. His workshop was a room behind a room behind a courtyard in Triana, the kind of place you find only by being told about it. There were instruments everywhere, hanging from the walls, leaning against shelves, lying on tables in various states of undress. It smelled of lacquer and cedar and the orange trees in the courtyard. "I can fix it," he said. "But the repair will cost more than the guitar is worth." "I know." He nodded. This was, I gathered, not unusual. People brought him things that weren't worth fixing, and he fixed them. The economics were beside the point. The point was that the crack should not be there. I left the guitar and came back in two weeks. Delgado had taken the back off, reglued the bracing, patched the crack with a piece of spruce he'd shaped by hand, refinished the repair so that you had to know where to look to see it. The work was invisible and perfect. He handed it to me. I played a chord. E minor, because it is the first chord I learned and the only one I play with any confidence. The sound was clear and warm and bigger than I expected. "Your father played?" Delgado asked. "No." "His father?" "Apparently. But he stopped." Delgado thought about this while he wrote the invoice. The amount was reasonable, which in Triana meant it was probably too low, and that arguing would be an insult. "My father was a carpenter," Delgado said. "He could build anything. Chairs, tables, cabinets. Beautiful work." He tore the invoice from the pad and handed it to me. "He built a boat once. Put it in the river. It sank in ten minutes. Perfect construction, but the wood was wrong. Pine. You don't build a boat from pine." "What did he do?" "He fished it out, brought it home, and turned it into a bookshelf. Best bookshelf you've ever seen. He had it for thirty years." Delgado looked at the guitar. "Sometimes the wrong thing becomes the right thing if you give it time." I carried the guitar home through the streets of Triana. It was evening, and the air was warm, and from somewhere in the neighbourhood someone was playing something fast and precise, the notes spilling out of an open window like water. I didn't recognize the piece. It didn't matter. I still don't play well. E minor, A minor, a clumsy D if I concentrate. But the guitar sounds right now, and some evenings I sit on the balcony and play those three chords, badly, while Republica watches from the doorway with an expression that could be contempt or could be something else. With that cat, it was always hard to tell.