Cremona

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 1: Cremona

The train from Milan slowed in increments, the way a held note decays, not all at once but in a long diminuendo that lets the listener feel each degree of lessening, and Nadia Kovac pressed her forehead against the window and watched the flat Lombard plain give way to the outskirts of a city she had never visited but had carried inside her for as long as she had carried music inside her, which was to say for as long as she could remember, which was to say for her entire life, which had been, until two years ago, a life organized entirely around the production of sound through the drawn bow and the pressed string and the particular, irreplaceable collaboration between right hand and left hand that the world calls violin performance and that she called, in the private language she used for the things that mattered most, the work.

Cremona. She said the word inside her mouth without speaking it. The syllables were Italian but the weight of them was older than Italian, older than the language itself, belonging to the substrate of association that musicians carry for this city the way the faithful carry the names of their holy places, because Cremona was a holy place, the holiest place, the place where Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu and the Amati family before them had bent over their workbenches in the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and produced the instruments that defined the sound of Western classical music, the instruments against which all subsequent instruments were measured and found, not wanting exactly, but later, which in the hierarchy of violin making is nearly the same thing.

The train stopped. The platform was concrete, modern, unremarkable. She gathered her bag, a single large duffel that contained everything she had brought from the United States, which was not much, because she had learned in the months after the diagnosis that the accumulation of objects is a form of faith in continuity, and her continuity had been interrupted, and the interruption had made her lighter in the way that loss makes a person lighter, not the lightness of freedom but the lightness of subtraction, the lightness of a shelf from which the heaviest book has been removed.

She stepped onto the platform and the September air was warm and thick with the humidity of the Po Valley, the great flat river plain of northern Italy where the fog rolls in from October to March and the summers are heavy and the autumns are a slow, golden transition between the two. She smelled diesel from the train, and beneath the diesel something else, something she could not yet name but that she would come to recognize as the smell of the city itself, which was the smell of old stone and river water and, threading through everything like a woodwind line beneath the strings, the faint, persistent, nearly subliminal smell of varnish and wood shavings and rosin, because Cremona was not merely a city that had once made violins but a city that still made violins, a city in which more than a hundred luthiers maintained workshops, in which the Scuola Internazionale di Liuteria trained new makers every year, in which the Museo del Violino housed instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri and Amati in climate-controlled cases and offered them to selected performers to play in a concert hall designed for the acoustics of the seventeenth century, a city that had organized its identity around the violin the way other cities organize their identities around cathedrals or rivers or industries, except that the violin was all three, a cathedral of sound and a river of tradition and an industry of the hands.

She walked. The station was south of the old city center, and the walk took her through streets that narrowed as they aged, the modern giving way to the medieval in a gradient that could be measured in the width of the sidewalks and the height of the buildings and the texture of the stone beneath her feet, which shifted from poured concrete to cobblestone to the uneven, hand-set paving that Italians call sampietrini, each stone a fist-sized cube worn smooth by centuries of feet. She passed a pharmacy, a bar with outdoor tables where old men sat with espresso and newspapers, a shop selling leather goods, a gelateria that would not interest her until March, when the cold broke and the city softened and the gelato shops opened their doors to the first warmth. She passed the Torrazzo, the bell tower of the cathedral, which rose from the Piazza del Comune like a declaration of vertical ambition, the tallest brick bell tower in the world, its medieval clock face tracking the zodiac in addition to the hours, as if the builders had understood that time in this city was measured not only in minutes and hours but in the larger cycles that governed the growth of the spruce trees in the Alpine valleys and the drying of the wood in the attics and the curing of the varnish in the workshops, the cycles that a luthier lived inside the way a farmer lives inside the seasons.

Via Palazzo. She found it by the directions Giovanni Ferraro had emailed her, handwritten directions that his daughter Lucia had typed and sent, because Giovanni did not use email, did not use the internet, did not use any technology that postdated the band saw, which was the single concession to modernity that he permitted in his workshop and which he justified not on the grounds of efficiency but on the grounds that his back could no longer manage the frame saw for the initial cuts, a justification that Lucia had relayed with the dry precision of a woman who had heard it many times and who understood that her father's relationship to his tools was not pragmatic but moral, a morality of the hands in which each tool represented not merely a function but a commitment, and the commitment was to the tradition, and the tradition was the thing that the workshop existed to preserve.

The building was centuries old. Three stories. The ground floor was the workshop. She could see it through the window before she reached the door, and the seeing stopped her on the sidewalk the way a chord change stops a listener, not with surprise exactly but with the recognition that the thing she had been moving toward was real, was here, was not the idea of a workshop but the workshop itself, and the difference between the idea and the thing was the difference that had brought her across the Atlantic, because ideas do not smell of spruce and varnish, and this place did.

Through the window she saw the front room. It was small, perhaps four meters by five, with a high ceiling crossed by dark wooden beams. Violins hung from pegs on the walls, seven or eight of them, finished instruments in various states of amber and red, their varnished surfaces catching the light from the window in ways that made them look less like objects than like captured gestures, the frozen shapes of something that had been moving and had been stilled. A glass-fronted cabinet held more instruments, and on a shelf above the cabinet sat a row of busts, wooden forms on which Giovanni tested the fit of chinrests and shoulder rests, each bust representing a different jaw angle, a different neck length, a different body type, because the violin is not a standardized object in the way that a piano is standardized, each violin must be fitted to the body that will play it, and the fitting is part of the craft, and the craft begins with the understanding that every body is different and every difference matters.

She pushed the door open. A bell rang, a small brass bell attached to the door frame by a coiled spring, and the sound was not the sound of a violin but it was a sound made by metal and vibration and air, which is what a violin's sound also is, and the kinship between the bell and the instruments on the walls was the kinship of all sounding things, which is the kinship of physics, which is the kinship of the world.

The front room was empty. She stood in it and breathed. The smell was the thing. The smell was spruce and maple and varnish and something else, something mineral and ancient that she would later learn was the smell of the hide glue that Giovanni used for all his joints, glue made from animal collagen, the same glue that Stradivari used, the same glue that every Cremonese luthier had used for five hundred years, because hide glue has properties that synthetic glues do not, it is reversible (an instrument glued with hide glue can be opened for repair), it is acoustically transparent (it does not dampen vibrations the way synthetic adhesives do), and it connects the maker to the tradition in a way that is not symbolic but material, the same substance touching the same wood in the same city for five centuries, and the substance is made from the bodies of animals, which means that the violin is made from trees and animals and the hands of the maker, which means that the violin is an object made entirely from the living world, which is why it sounds alive, which is why it has always sounded alive, which is why the first time Nadia heard a violin, at age four, at a concert in Minneapolis to which her mother had taken her on a winter evening so cold that the walk from the parking garage to Orchestra Hall had made her cry, the first time she heard a violin she understood, in the way that a four-year-old understands, which is to say completely and without language, that the sound was the sound of something alive, and the aliveness was the thing she wanted, and the wanting became the work, and the work became her life, and her life became the hand, and the hand became the injury, and the injury became the loss, and the loss became the train to Cremona, and Cremona became this room, and this room smelled of spruce and maple and varnish and hide glue, and the smell was the smell of the living world, and she stood in it and breathed.

A door at the back of the front room opened.

He was shorter than she had expected. Seventy-eight years old, thin in the way that Italian men of his generation are thin, a thinness that comes not from deprivation but from a lifetime of moderate eating and continuous physical work, the work of the hands translating into the body's leanness the way the work of the bow translates into the violinist's posture, each profession shaping the body that practices it. His hair was white, thick, swept back from a forehead that was high and lined. His eyes were dark, nearly black, and they regarded her with an attention that she recognized because she had seen it in the eyes of conductors and first-chair players and all the people whose work requires the ability to assess in an instant the quality of the thing before them, whether the thing is a passage of music or a piece of wood or a young woman standing in the front room of a violin workshop with a duffel bag and a left hand that no longer does what it was trained to do.

Giovanni Ferraro looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them spoke for a moment that was not awkward but attentive, the kind of silence that musicians understand because they live inside silences, the rests between notes that are not the absence of music but the architecture of it, the space that gives the sound its shape.

He said something in Italian. She caught the word benvenuta, which is the feminine form of welcome, which meant he had been expecting her, which meant the emails that Lucia had sent and Nadia had answered and Lucia had forwarded to Giovanni (reading them aloud, Nadia would later learn, in the workshop while Giovanni planed a piece of spruce and listened the way he listened to everything, with his whole body, his hands continuing their work while his ears did theirs) had prepared him for this moment.

She said, in the Italian she had been studying for three months, that she was Nadia, that she had come from America, that she was grateful.

He nodded. He turned. He walked through the door to the back room, and she followed, because following was the first act of the apprenticeship, and the apprenticeship had begun, and the beginning was not marked by a handshake or a contract or a ceremony but by the act of walking through a door, which is the oldest form of beginning, the passage from one room to another, from one life to another, from the life of the performer to the life of the maker, from the front room where the finished instruments hung in their beauty to the back room where the work happened, and the work was the thing, and the thing was the craft, and the craft was waiting for her on the other side of the door.

The back room was larger than the front. Two workbenches dominated the space, heavy tables built from beech, their surfaces scarred and stained and shaped by decades of use, the wood of the benches holding the history of the instruments that had been made upon them in the form of gouges and cuts and circular stains from glue pots and long smears of varnish that had been wiped and re-wiped but never fully removed, because the stains were not mistakes but records, and the records were the workshop's memory, and the memory was written in wood and glue and varnish, which is the only language the workshop speaks.

At the far bench sat a man. Thirtyish, dark-haired, wearing a canvas apron over a plain blue shirt. He looked up when Nadia entered and his eyes registered her presence with the mild interest of a person who has been told to expect a new colleague and who is reserving judgment in the patient way of a craftsman, which is to say that he would judge her by her work and her work had not yet begun and therefore judgment could wait, and the waiting was not indifference but respect, the respect of a man who knew how long it took to learn the things that the workshop had to teach.

Giovanni said, in Italian, that this was Marco, and Marco nodded, and Nadia nodded, and the nodding was sufficient, and the sufficiency was the first lesson of the workshop, which was that words are not always necessary, that the nod and the gesture and the look and the silence carry meaning with an efficiency that language cannot match, because language is approximate and the work is precise, and in the space between the approximate and the precise is the craft, and the craft speaks through the hands.

The room had two windows, both facing north. Northern light. Nadia knew why. Every painter knows why, and every luthier knows why, and the reason is the same: northern light is indirect, consistent, even. It does not shift with the movement of the sun. It does not cast the sharp shadows that southern light casts. It illuminates without dramatizing, reveals without distorting, and in a workshop where the difference between 2.8 millimeters and 2.6 millimeters of plate thickness can be the difference between a violin that sings and a violin that merely sounds, the quality of the light is not an aesthetic preference but a professional requirement, and the requirement has been understood in Cremona for five centuries, which is why the workshops face north, which is why the workbenches are placed beneath the windows, which is why Giovanni and Marco worked in a light that was gentle and true and that had been illuminating the craft since before the craft had a name.

On the walls: tools. Planes and gouges and chisels and knives and clamps and forms, arranged not with the decorative precision of a museum display but with the functional order of a working space, each tool in its place because the hand that reaches for it must find it without looking, because looking away from the work is a break in the attention and the attention is the thing, the continuous thread of concentration that runs from the maker's mind through the maker's hands to the tool to the wood to the shape that is emerging from the wood, and the thread must not break, and the tools on the wall are arranged to keep it from breaking.

On the workbench nearest the door, Giovanni's bench, lay a piece of wood. Spruce. A half-plank, rough-cut, the surface showing the saw marks from the initial cutting, the grain visible as a pattern of lines running the length of the plank, lines that were the record of the tree's growth, each line a year, each year a ring, each ring a season of sun and rain and cold and the slow, patient accumulation of cellulose that is the tree's way of building itself, the tree's craft, the tree's work.

Giovanni placed his hand on the plank. He did not say anything. He placed his hand on the wood and he looked at Nadia and the look said: this is where it begins. Here. In the wood. In the hand on the wood. In the touch that precedes the cut, the assessment that precedes the shaping, the knowing that precedes the making. This is where it begins and this is where it ends and the beginning and the ending are connected by the work, and the work is what you have come here to learn, and the learning begins now, and now is the hand on the wood, and the wood is waiting, and the waiting is the first thing the wood teaches, because the wood has been waiting for seven years in an attic on Via Palazzo while the seasons passed and the moisture left and the cells stiffened and the acoustic properties that make a violin's top plate ring with the particular brightness of Cremonese spruce developed in the silence and the dark, and the silence and the dark are part of the making, and the making includes the waiting, and the waiting is not nothing, the waiting is the first act of creation, the act that precedes all other acts, the patience that the wood requires and that the maker learns from the wood, and the patience is the craft, and the craft is the thing.

Nadia set her bag on the floor. She stood at the workbench. She looked at the plank of spruce beneath Giovanni's hand, the grain lines running parallel, the wood pale and dry and ready.

She placed her hand on the wood next to his.

The wood was cool. The wood was dry. The wood was patient.

She was in Cremona. She was in the workshop. The apprenticeship had begun.