By: Sylvia Davila MM
Bogotá
For him, my brother Alfredo, almost everything became a challenge that he would face to its last consequences. That was the essence of his character. The smallest curiosity grew in his mind an enterprise of unthinkable dimension.
Any given day, he decided to fix an ancient piano that his wife had inherited from her mother, Mamía. Where the piano had come from had always touched his curiosity. Determined to fix it, he checked all technicians in town, visited them, inquired about the quality of their work and, finally, chose one.
Any given day, he decided to fix an ancient piano that his wife had inherited from her mother, Mamía. Where the piano had come from had always touched his curiosity. Determined to fix it, he checked all technicians in town, visited them, inquired about the quality of their work and, finally, chose one.
A patient middle age man carrying a briefcase swiss clockmaker like, showed up and opened the mysteries of the piano. Alfredo followed the operation wanting to know asking everything about the inner life of the instrument. He also found a thick layer of dust and got himself to clean it. He was doing it when he saw it... a metal inscription attached to a lateral panel. He run to his desk, got paper and pencil, came down, got three quarter of himself inside the belly of the piano and copy it. There were only three lines: a name, a number, and a date. That was all he needed. Now, nobody could stop him.
The lines were written in a language he did not know. It looked like Russian, though. As he knew nobody from that part of the world he emailed his japanese clients, who enjoyed the flowers he sold to them just as much as every personal enterprise he engaged on. Time passed and he got his answer. The manufacturer, its numerical reference, and a date, 1890. A thorough search in the web until he found the manufacturer. In fact, it happened to be an ancient piano firm that went back to the Czarism. He emailed them and waited.
I wonder if he was always lucky enough to find some obsessive like him, or if his dissuasion skills were good because, against all odds, somebody at the Russian steppes had to go back in reverse over Perestroika, stalinism, bolshevik revolution, and czarism to find the archives that revealed that the piano had been sent to a distribution firm in Paris in 1892.
Again, many hours at his laptop until he found the french firm and, of course, emailed them. Again, somebody took the time to check archives back to the French Revolution and emailed him back informing that the piano had been sent to Seville, Spain, to a distribution firm that made business with the Americas. Alfredo was transformed in a living alleluia. His smile shined all around him. When I asked him if he had already emailed them, he gave me that kind of look who do you think you’re talking to?. Almost six months had gone by since he found the piece of data that the silent piano hid.
This time his research would slow down. He sent not just one but four e-mails but no answer came back. Unable to give up, he would send everyday a mail and wait. He sent so many that somebody enervated went through the Archivo de las Indias and found it. The piano had been sent to Peru in 1900. The piano was already in the continent.
But archives in this part of the world are not as precise, his search bounced against a wall. When he was preparing a journey to Lima to follow the piano steps, his wife who has been silently observing him for months, stopped him. Her grandfather had been Ambassador to Peru, he must have bought it there. Twenty mails, nine months and tons of patience had done it. He had tracked the piano from the hands of the maker to his living room.
His research accomplished you could see him, every now and then, sitting in his living room looking at the piano with that sort of Monalisa smile. When somebody asked him where that beautiful piano had come from, he would answer: From Mamia’s. /SILVIA DAVILA MORALES®
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