Anna, the same Anna who is now playing with me, the same one who directs hatred at me every time she looks my way—a hatred you can smell, feel, and perceive; a hatred that shines in her eyes and she can’t control; a hatred that she puts in her music now that she’s playing with me—well, that very same Anna was the best student I’ve ever had. I realized that she had a special talent, even though she was missing something. She needed to put her heart, or her soul, as Karl would say, into it. Karl couldn’t find that in her, because he had begun to doubt that she had a soul. First, it seemed she did, and I thought she really could become a first-rate violinist; her agility was exceptional, and in a violinist that’s very important. There are very fast passages that most professionals struggle to play, and it turns out that she was able to play them in just her fourth year of studying the instrument.
The day that Anna came to class with her father, Maties, she was still very young. And I remember that she didn’t know where to look, because the maid used to always bring her—then her mother had left, and now her father, who apparently had never had any interest in the child, had shown up out of the blue. On that day, her father came over to ask me which instrument would be best for his daughter, because he wanted to buy her one. And Anna was looking first at the floor, then the window. I said to her, Anna, you’ll play better with one for adults; you’ve outgrown this one. I said it to get her to look at us, but she wouldn’t, she was eaten up by insecurity. She really had outgrown it and her mother had refused to buy her another one. Oh, she had no interest in music, Maties explained—and, in a low voice he’d added, but one of the conditions for her keeping the girl was that she study violin because, you know, I always wanted to play but we couldn’t afford the lessons; my parents had enough problems paying for my obligatory studies—I mean, regular school, you understand.
Yes, I understood, he didn’t need to tell me; I had a mother without a cent to her name who had scrubbed apartments. I wondered if he would also have scrubbed apartments to be able to study the violin, if he’d had to steal hours of sleep in order to do it all, and then practice for hours and hours. Would he have managed the snowballing hours the instrument and its professional study demanded, unable to take the violin to be repaired for several years, without the money to pay for even that trifle? I was always just breaking even, and my mother was having an increasingly hard time of it; she was very tired and very slow in her cleaning, so much that they finally fired her. Luckily, she still had her sewing, which she’d never given up, and she would sew and I would play, and we got by like that. I no longer played on the beach, though. I would play all morning long at home, but I played in tune, so I didn’t drive the neighbors nuts—even though I did repeat the same passages over and over to get them perfect. Mother, with her sewing machine by my side, seemed not to mind, even though I really did go on past the point of tiresome and was at it every single day. I only went to the beach when I was short on time and had to practice all night for something the next day.
We couldn’t move to a new apartment, neighborhood, or situation until I managed to graduate—until I became a real violinist after passing the classes of instrument and harmony and composition and all those things you had to do back then, which are now a thousand times more. Then, the day I graduated, we went out to celebrate and we spent a little beyond our means on lunch. We had never been to a restaurant before that day, and we wanted to be served, which was what we always did at the houses where we worked, after all. That meant the end of looking for scholarships for my classes; from then on it was about finding someone to pay me.
In the first movement, Anna tries to best me any way she can. But now that we’d started the second, I’m beating her. The second, that largo ma non tanto, slow and drawn out, is where you need soul. That is where my gaze dares to meet hers, but she closes her eyes and brings her brows together to make that wrinkle between her eyes that I’ve seen all my life. It is a wrinkle I helped to create. And I really loved her; it makes me sad: She was an unlucky child no one had loved, even though it seemed that her father wanted to turn that around. Anna was my opposite: plenty of money and no love. But if I had to choose, I’d stick with my childhood, full of love but no money.
I found work right away; they were looking for new teachers at the conservatory and it was a time of change. The dictator’s regime fell and everything was different. Everyone was protesting over everything, and I just wanted a job. I got one and I didn’t leave there until I had to ask for a leave of absence to go on tour with Karl. And then other conductors started to ask me to play for them. My life took a turn with the change of the century. Everything is change, like Karl’s East Berlin, which despite everything is still run through with some scars, traces of a wall that separated people without any criteria. Just because some lived here and others there, they weren’t allowed to cross to the other side. I know Mark quite well, and he also carries that scar, in his eyes. And Karl had it too.
And when I saw my mother for the last time, she had generosity in her eyes. Now that we live well, she said with resignation. Those were her last words, and she was right. We were living in the new apartment, I had been a teacher for a few years, and Anna had already been my student for about one. I missed two days of class and, when I returned, I told all the students what had happened, and they all gave me their condolences. But not Anna, Anna didn’t say a thing. And I looked at her and realized that her gaze was hostile, that she was recriminating me for not having gone to class, for having missed my student-teacher date with her; she didn’t find it right at all that I hadn’t been there. The truth is that in that moment I found it strange, but then I forgot all about it when life went back to normal, and our student-teacher relationship did as well.
But I saw that same look in her eyes when Maties and I started to date. I had bumped into Anna with her father at the Palau de la Música and that was where it all started; we began chatting. Years had passed and Anna was very far along in her studies, she was a girl who, bit by bit, had learned happiness and sensitivity at her father’s side, and musically she had come a long way as well. She had relaxed and managed to do what it takes to make music, real music.
But it didn’t last long, because that was the end of it all. We all went out to dinner and she seemed happy, but then Maties and I exchanged phone numbers and she didn’t like that as much. When she realized that something special was growing between us, she changed again and, suddenly, I saw in her the girl who met me with hostility when I returned to class after burying my mother. That day she was afraid of being left by the only person who was there for her. And then, with Maties, she thought I was snatching her father away from her.
Maybe we should forget about this, I sadly said one day to Maties, when I thought the situation was untenable. No, she will understand; she has to understand, he said. After all, he was right, a girl who was already an adult couldn’t dictate what her father did with his life. But it hurt me, and suddenly, Anna stopped putting what she had been putting into her music. It was as if it were all tied together: her personality, her moods, and, above all, her soul. Suddenly, she had lost it again, and no matter what instructions I gave, there was no way to get her back to the Anna she had been before, the Anna of the past four years. I tried to talk to her; I asked her if she was upset by the fact that her father and I were dating. She answered that our lives weren’t her business, although she wouldn’t meet my gaze, and she asked me to go back to the music: that we didn’t have much time, all of a sudden she was always in a hurry, she always had to leave.
My relationship with Maties grew, while my relationship with Anna deteriorated. When I went to their house, she was never there, or she disappeared as soon as she heard me come in. She had become invisible. Then, at the conservatory, they told me she had requested a different teacher. I was shocked.
Then I did what I never should have done, but it was a last ditch attempt to get her on my side, to get her to at least have a bit of affection for me. For all three of our sakes, I gave her my Stainer. She had seen it on more than one occasion, and I knew she envied it. I had never told her where I’d gotten it; normally, I taught with another violin and only brought it in every once in a while. And then I gave it to her. I thought that that would solve everything, that letting go of a gem like that was worth it if it meant winning over a person I needed on my side. I also thought that things with Maties would move forward and that we’d eventually end up living together, and the violin would stay in the family. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I gave it to her.
That day when I lost my head, I also lost what had saved my life at the age of seven. I didn’t get anything out of it, except for a thank-you and a sarcastic smile. At our last class, I placed it gently in her hands. Since it was a magic violin, I thought that it would allow Anna to find her soul in music. But that wasn’t the case: in her hands, the Stainer turned into just another instrument, nothing more, it no longer made magical music, it lost its enchanted aura I had seen at the dump. But she didn’t refuse to accept it, she took it immediately. I was left without Anna, without the violin, and, a few years later, without Maties as well.
Now, she pulls the Stainer out as often as she can in front of me, to rub my nose in it, and I think I’ll never find another like it. Giving it to her was so stupid of me—so, so stupid. But Anna is the one who lacks true music, with or without the Stainer. And I’ve got it.