The Hermit (14 page)

–
Noches
, he says, getting to his feet with the Maasai girl’s help and going inside. Erhard follows him. Visiting Emanuel is never fun, but he’s Erhard’s best client. The client he’s had the longest, and the only one who pays Erhard a regular salary to tune the piano on the third Thursday of every month. And to be available if something’s wrong with the piano. But during the course of fifteen years, Emanuel has only asked for that extra service twice. The second time being today.

The first time Erhard came out for special service, it wasn’t the piano that needing tuning, but a son who played pop music. That was when Erhard met Raúl. Erhard examined the piano for twenty seconds, then saw the young man standing in the corner. Erhard inspected the piano again, raised his hammer, scraped a little steel wool against the strings. Then he explained to Emanuel that something was wrong with the piano. It could be fixed, but it would be pricey and take a few months. Palabras, who was a heavy-set man, glared at Erhard, then threw up his hands in the way that Erhard had come to understand meant,
It already has
. The man loved his Fazzi. That much was clear from the outset.

On his way out, Erhard took hold of Raúl. He was a gangly, frivolous person, Erhard sensed. I’ll take you to a real teacher, he told him. If he was going to play a Fazioli, then he should play it properly. Erhard used the money he earned fixing the perfectly tuned piano to pay the city’s best pianist, the schoolteacher Vivi, who lived in Gornjal. If Erhard happened to be in the area, he picked up Raúl himself and drove him down there. Raúl became a good, if not great, pianist. Whenever his discontent was transferred to the keys, he could play Gershwin and Bernstein with conviction.

Although Emanuel is less imposing that he’d once been, he’s still a force. Also from the back when he’s wearing his strange cloak – blanket, really – over his shoulder. His gait is shuffling and he breathes in wheezy gasps, as if he’s fighting his way through a swamp and not his own mansion towards his sunroom in the opposite wing. The man has built – with the help of his architects and his gardeners – a home that doesn’t sound, smell, or feel like anything else on the Canary Islands. The orange clay walls, bamboo fans, patterned columns, and endless rows of lion heads are meant to resemble Africa – that colonized and ravaged continent, suffocated by the obese white man.

That’s Erhard’s view of it anyway, not part of the romantic tale Emanuel has told him again and again, whenever he wants to say something about his residence, the Maasai girls – who’re kept in God knows what room – or the Spanish mother country, so far away, so beloved, so yearned for, and so cursed. Oh, remember back when the Spanish conquered Africa and enjoyed its nature and the simple things in life.

They’ve reached the piano. Emanuel sits on the bench and plays Abril’s ‘Coral’. It’s the only piece that he ever wishes to play, or even knows how to. Everything else is just noise to him, an unnecessary burden on the piano, unworthy of a Fazzi. Erhard is no Abril expert, but he can tell that Emanuel plays the music well and fiercely and much too fast. There’s an imprecision on the E key, not a huge problem – in fact, it’s one of those problems that Erhard actually likes, one that he prefers to ignore, because it gives the piano its character. Standing beside the piano, he listens as Palabras wraps up the piece. Emanuel’s fingers rise from the keys as if they were a house of cards.

He doesn’t say a word, just fixes a firm stare on Erhard: Do you hear that clinking noise? his eyes seem to suggest.

Erhard says he hears something on F, but no clinking on Gb. He tests the chords. He sweeps some dust from the box and lightly polishes the strings.

Emanuel once again plays the entire composition from the beginning. Still Erhard doesn’t hear anything. When Emanuel plays the piece for the third time, Erhard walks around the piano and stands on Emanuel’s left side. Now he hears a faint rustling sound, like a pinecone rolling across a dry forest floor. But it’s not coming from the piano, it’s coming from Emanuel himself. He’s breathing excitedly, too rapidly. Erhard sees his chest in the slit between the cloak and his unevenly buttoned shirt. ‘Coral’ is a stimulating composition, and Erhard’s certain that if he gazed in the darkness between Emanuel’s legs, he would see an erection in his thin trousers. The man’s more than eighty years old, no doubt horny as a goat, and incapable of fucking any of his Maasai girls no matter how much he’d like to. But here at the piano he can, for whatever reason, still get it up. But he pays for it with his laboured breathing.

– Do you have a CD player? Erhard asks.

Emanuel looks at him, confused. Of course he doesn’t. In this house they have gramophone records and radio. Erhard explains that if he doesn’t want to hear the crackle in ‘Coral’ he needs to do exactly what Erhard says. No questions asked. Emanuel’s sitting uneasily on the piano bench. He’s not used to doing what others tell him. Finally he throws up his hand.

– I’ll be back in an hour to remove that noise. In the meantime, find that girl who takes care of you and ask her to wait in the driveway until I return. Emanuel sizes him up, but says nothing. Erhard heads out to his car.

He drives downtown. As he passes Calle Cervera he searches for Alina, but if she’s still working, she’s not there now. There’s an odour, a mixture of lamb and petrol. He keeps the motor running while he runs into a music shop on the corner of High Street called Bird. They sell mostly jazz and a sampling of modern music, but in the basement they’ve got a rather pedestrian collection of classical music. Luckily, Abril’s ‘Coral’ is among the most popular piano concertos on the Spanish islands. Erhard even knows of a version produced by Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid; he nods at the shopkeeper, Antón, then heads directly down the winding stairwell to the basement. They’ve got two versions of ‘Coral’, one of which is the Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid. He also asks Antón to go online and find the sheet music to the concerto ‘Allegro’ and print it out, with Erhard paying half a euro per sheet. Antón doesn’t like doing that. Stupid Internet, he says, standing beside the computer. He’ll go out of business soon, he adds, because no one wants to pay for music any more. How am I supposed to compete with the geeks of the world when you can get everything you want for free? Erhard agrees with him in principle, but doesn’t know much about how the Internet works. Once he’s done in the shop, he drives up the street to Electron and buys a CD player. He doesn’t own a CD player, but they have one in the break-room at work. He haggles the price down to thirty euros. When he emerges from the store, he considers getting some roasted shrimp at the small corner kiosk, but watching the man flip the pink shellfish with a newspaper nauseates him. He drives back to Palabras’s mansion.

27

She’s like a space alien in black leather: sleek, gorgeous, and frightening. And she’s standing in the driveway waiting for him, just as he’d asked. He’s never spoken to her. Never heard her voice. In fact, he doesn’t even know whether she speaks. He explains to her what she needs to do. She listens without blinking. When he asks her if she understands what he’s saying, she nods, but it doesn’t seem like she does. She doesn’t have any questions about Erhard’s plan, or any reluctance to carry it out.

– Me to do it with Manny with music, she repeats.

– Right, Erhard says, and considers how funny it is that one of the island’s most powerful men is called Manny by a… what is she? A 20-year-old girl.

– Manny can’t, he can’t, his stick too soft, it makes him angry.

Erhard shakes his head, points at a CD, and shows her with his index finger how Manny’s dick will respond. Her eyes gleam with laughter, but she remains silent. It makes her look even more frightening.

– Come with me, he says.

They go inside and find Emanuel where they left him an hour before. He stares unhappily at Erhard’s hands, as if he’d expected tools instead of shopping bags.

– What now, Piano Tuner?

Erhard reminds him of his promise to do exactly as he’d asked. The man nods once. Erhard clutches his arm and guides him into the next room, then deposits him on a white leather sofa that’s never been touched.

– Sit here and listen to the music while I fix the piano.

Erhard unpacks the CD player, inserts the CD, and presses play. Emanuel lurches at the sound of the first notes, staring distrustfully at the CD player. Erhard nods to the girl, who sits beside Emanuel and pulls up her dress. Emanuel doesn’t notice, a combination of astonishment and undefined softness having overtaken his normally livid face. Erhard returns to the piano room.

He sets the ‘Allegro’ book on the music stand and opens it to page one. He fiddles loudly at the piano, putting in the tuning lever but doing nothing with it. The piano is extraordinarily beautiful, one of the first F308s ever produced at Fazioli’s workshop, in 1987. Although Erhard has never played anything on it but chords, he’s often dreamed of sneaking into this room when Emanuel wasn’t home and hammering on the enormous piano. The sound is much different than other pianos: pure, undisturbed, and better than the best Steinway Erhard has ever tuned. Thanks to the air conditioner, it’s housed in the perfect temperature, and it’s never in direct sunlight. He can’t even begin to describe how ridiculous it is to suspect the piano of making a rustling noise. In all the years that he’s visited this mansion, he has never made the piano sound better – only worse. Some clients have called him a wizard because he can touch an instrument for a few minutes with the tuning wrench and make their piano-playing better than it’s ever been. They expect him to arrive with modern equipment. Instead he simply listens, then makes their piano sound like a living, breathing creature instead of a robot. The secret isn’t to make every tone perfectly pure, but perfectly imperfect. It gives the piano its character, and the right sound. Every piano tuner knows this, but none will ever tell their clients. Throw in mathematics – and forget mathematics. Every client wants the optimum, the correctly harmonized instrument, but in reality that’s not what they want.

The music reaches the dramatic intermezzo about three minutes into ‘Coral’.

He hears the cigar table being scraped across the floor, then sees the girl’s long legs sticking out. There’s an odd grunt, probably because she’s seated astride Emanuel’s lap, riding him like a debt-ridden jockey on the last day of the season. Emanuel’s not used to hearing ‘Coral’ played with strings, and Erhard wonders if he’ll develop a new appreciation of Abril. Erhard pours himself a glass of Pedro Ximénez from a bottle resting on a small table next to the piano, then walks out to the little orchid and cactus garden that adjoins the sunroom. The garden, now the domain of butterflies, is covered by a thin net that provides shade during the day and keeps birds and other large pests out. The butterflies are everywhere. They sit on the cacti’s sharp spikes like birds on branches, fluttering their wings. Lamps arranged between the plants illuminate the garden, along with a few large floodlights in the ceiling, which almost make it feel like daytime.

Right in front of Erhard is one of those butterflies with bright yellow wings, and he considers how long it’s actually been since the last time he saw a yellow butterfly like those they have back home in West Jutland, in Denmark, where his maternal grandfather Claus lived in a squalid little house with a wife who never spoke. Through the door he hears ‘Coral’ start up again. Emanuel must be getting a second ride. The lucky bastard.

Erhard holds up his index finger, trying to get one of the butterflies to view him as a black cactus. But they know the difference. Of course they do. There are very few butterflies on the island, and he guesses it’s because of the wind and the climate. That’s why it just seems like another expression of Emanuel’s power: to own a surfeit of butterflies. Like his stock of cars, girls, water, flowers, hunting trophies, expensive beef, and Spanish wine. And money. But Emanuel never talks about his money, that’s one difference. He refuses to talk about it. If someone mentions money or the fact that Emanuel’s wealthy, he becomes cross. On multiple occasions Erhard has heard him call Raúl a cursed Judas, because he asked him for money for some project or to pay off his debts. One time a while back, Emanuel told Erhard that his family hailed from Vallecas, the poorest quarter of Madrid, where all the houses are built with plastic bottles and corrugated cardboard. Maybe he’s ashamed of his money – or at the way he earned it?

Erhard thinks about the little boy. And Alina. Emanuel Palabras could finance her little Madrid trip and an extravagant shopping spree as if it were nothing more than purchasing a couple of lottery tickets. Hell, it’s cheaper than a few butterflies or a new cactus. He could ask him. He has a special relationship to Emanuel, a relationship that he’s never taken advantage of or wished to take advantage of. But maybe it’s time to cash in on that goodwill. Send the girl away and teach the police a lesson. Emanuel would like that, Erhard is certain. Like most everyone whose business is balanced on the edge of the law, Palabras takes exquisite pleasure in seeing the police exposed and humiliated. On the other hand, he wouldn’t like the story about the boy. Why should Erhard get involved? If he says anything to Palabras, he’s got to have a good reason.

28

When the sherry is gone, he heads back inside. ‘Coral’ is playing for the fourth or fifth time, but after a few minutes, he sees the girl trot down the hallway, her clothes bundled in her arms. Emanuel enters the room and goes directly to his piano. His lower lip is red and puffy, as if he – or the girl – bit it.

– So, have you fixed it?

– I forbid you to play ‘Coral’ on this piano for three months, Erhard says.

– You’re not my doctor. I’ll play whatever I wish to play, Emanuel barks angrily, and yet with a smile beneath his beard, as if he knows what Erhard’s about to say.

– You’ve promised to do what I say. Play ‘Allegro’ for three months, and you will no longer hear the rustling.

He knows what effort this will require of him. For two decades Emanuel has played ‘Coral’ like a man smoking his favourite cigarette, focused, his sights set on death. Now Erhard’s asking him to switch to nicotine patches.