THE TUNER

This short story is part of SINFUL STORIES, a collection by Rebecca Brand.

I. The Ear

Clara Vilar was thirty-eight years old, had small hands, and possessed a virtue that no conservatory ever taught: she could listen to the inside of things. Not the sound, but what lies beneath the sound. The tension of a string, the dampness of a felt, the exact point where a mechanism gives up. For twenty years she had been giving voices back to mute instruments, and in those twenty years she had learned that an old piano is not a piece of furniture: it is a body that has been touched and that remembers.

She had started as a child, in her father’s workshop, among wood shavings and tuning pins. Her father tuned pianos for churches and conservatories and took her with him because he had no one to leave her with. Clara spent the afternoons on a low stool, watching him turn the tuning wrench, and very soon she noticed something odd: when her father struck a key, the skin on one specific spot on her body prickled. Her neck. Her wrist. The hollow behind her knee. She told him once and her father laughed. “Girl, that’s imagination.” But Clara never stopped feeling it.

Over the years the gift sharpened. It became precise, almost unbearable. She could walk into a strange house and know whether there was a piano by the way the nape of her neck prickled before hearing a single note. She could press a key and know whether the instrument had been loved or merely used. Pianos touched by affectionate hands gave back warmth. Those touched by cold hands, by a teacher’s hands, by hands that only sought approval, gave back something dry, like a handshake. Clara preferred the first ones. She had grown used to living among objects that remembered more than people did.

At seventeen she became an apprentice in the workshop of one Beltrán, a dry old tuner who had spent forty years sticking his hands into conservatory pianos. Beltrán didn’t believe in Clara’s gift; he believed in the ear, which can be measured, and in the tuning fork, which doesn’t lie. But one afternoon, after she tuned a studio upright with a precision he hadn’t managed in two visits, the old man stared at her from the other side of the workshop and said a phrase Clara never forgot: “You don’t tune pianos, girl. You listen to them from the inside. That’s something else, and it’s going to cost you dear.”

The gift had a price, and it wasn’t paid in money. Every instrument left a sediment of someone else’s life inside her, and Clara didn’t always have the strength to carry it. She learned to move through other people’s houses like a museum: looking, not touching, holding her breath. But pianos, when they’re alone, call out.

It cost her. It cost her every cold church piano, every rehearsal-room upright, every waiting-room instrument. Because there was something in all of them, and it was almost never good. Conservatory pianos were full of fear: children playing with stiff backs and short nails, teachers rapping the music stand with a baton. Clara came out of those jobs with her neck in a knot, like someone who has carried another’s weight. She learned to place her fingers on the keyboard with a surgeon’s delicacy, to press a key and withdraw her hand before the piano’s memory climbed up her arm. She learned to ration herself.

But there were pianos that undid her. One, a Bechstein in an uptown flat, left her trembling for almost an hour. It had belonged to a woman who had slowly faded away in that house over fifteen years. Each key held a tired touch, without strength, almost resigned, and at the end of the keyboard, in the high notes, there was a gesture Clara recognized at once: the hand lifting from the piano when you no longer expect anyone, when you play so as not to hear the silence of the house. Clara played that high note and felt, with total clarity, a loneliness that wasn’t hers, and she burst into tears in the middle of a stranger’s living room, her case open at her feet. From then on she knew her job wasn’t to repair pianos. It was to bring them out of mourning. To give them back a voice that wasn’t a lament.

Because people, in her life, had been few and brief. She’d had a husband, Tomás, six years, and he’d left without drama, with the feeling that neither of them had ever quite touched the other. She’d had a lover or two afterward, sporadic, correct, the kind who undress in order and finish with the same politeness with which they began. And Clara, who could feel the vibration of a string from 1890 in her fingertips, had never felt that precision with a man. She’d never been with anyone who touched her the way one tunes an instrument: listening, correcting, seeking the right tension. She had resigned herself. She’d told herself the gift was for pianos and that men were something else, another material, less sensitive, less noble.

When her father died, Clara inherited his workshop, his wrenches, his appointment book, and his silence. She sold what she could, kept the essentials, and kept tuning. In her father’s notebook was a list of clients in small, cramped handwriting, and Clara crossed them off one by one, not out of resentment, but because each house reminded her of a childhood afternoon with an apron stained with grease and her father’s voice calling her. It took her three years to cross off the whole list. When she finished, she sat down on the stool and realized she had no one to talk to about her work. Or about anything.

That was how she’d reached thirty-eight. With a perfect ear, a small workshop, a rented flat, and a life without surprises. And with the growing suspicion that she was turning into one of those pianos she herself had learned to bring out of mourning: an instrument that was tuned, yes, but that no one played anymore. She was wrong, but she didn’t know it yet.

II. The Commission

They called her in March, from an auction house downtown. They needed a neutral ear. A Steinway from 1890, from an inheritance, from a family getting rid of everything; the instrument had spent forty years in a closed parlor and now they wanted it appraised before putting it up for auction. They didn’t want a concert pianist, who plays the way everyone knows: with a trained hand, with the repertoire on top, judging the piano by what it does with the music and not by what it is. They wanted someone without schooling, without prejudices, without fingers that run away on their own. They wanted, they said, someone capable of listening to the piano and not of showing off with it.

“Clara Vilar,” she said on the phone. “When?”

They gave her the address of a big, empty house where no one lived anymore. They gave her a key and permission to access the parlor while the auction was being prepared. They warned her the parlor was huge, that it was cold, that there was dust. They warned her, above all, that the instrument had gone four decades without anyone laying a hand on it, and that it might be dead.

Clara hung up and felt, before seeing it, a tingle at the base of her spine. A piano from 1890, mute for forty years, in a closed parlor. A sleeping body. She thought, without meaning to, of what a piano like that might have stored up.

She arrived on a Thursday in March, at five in the afternoon, with her case of felts and wrenches, the leather belt crossed at her waist where she carried her tools, a linen blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and dark trousers. The house had very high ceilings, with arched windows through which a yellow, slanting light came in. She knew that kind of house by heart: the ones that empty out long before their owner dies. Houses with the marks of furniture still on the walls and a smell of closed rooms. She’d been in twenty just like them. And all of them had, in some corner, an instrument waiting for someone to dare to play it. The wooden floor creaked under her boots. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture. Everything was bare, and in the middle of the parlor, covered by a white sheet, waited the large shape, animal-shaped.

Clara stood a moment in the doorway. Something fluttered in her throat. Grand pianos, when they’re covered, have a deceptive silhouette: they look like a coffin, or a beast lying down. She approached slowly, the way one approaches a dog that you don’t know whether it’s sleeping or dead.

She put her hand on the sheet and felt the dust. And beneath the dust, through the cloth, she felt the walnut. It was warm.

Her whole skin prickled. A stopped piano, in a house without heating, at five in the afternoon on a cold March day, had no reason to be warm. And it was. Warm like the imprint of a bed someone has just gotten out of.

“Hello,” Clara said softly, and it seemed silly, but she said it.

She pulled off the sheet.

III. The Sleeping Animal

Out from under the cloth came a deep black grand piano, with the varnish cracked and the walnut of the inside of the lid showing where the black had worn away. Clara ran her eyes over it the way one runs one’s eyes over a naked body after a long time: unhurried, stopping at what matters. The keyboard, eighty-eight keys of yellowed ivory, some split, one or two missing. The pedals, worn. The lid, closed, with a thin layer of dust.

It wasn’t a piece of furniture. It was a sleeping animal. She knew it with the same certainty with which one knows whether someone is breathing in a dark room. And like a sleeping animal, she treated it: without turning her back on it, without making noise, without quite believing that thing was inert.

She laid her palm on the walnut lid. The varnish was tepid, genuinely warm, and she left it there a while, without moving, feeling beneath her hand a minimal vibration, like a purr that can’t be heard, only felt. She closed her eyes. Twenty years of the trade and she’d never touched a piano like this, so full, so charged, so half-awake. Other pianos gave her back information; this one gave her back something like the breathing of someone sleeping on the other side of the wall.

She lifted the lid. The interior appeared in shadow, with the strings taut and the iron plate, and the smell of old wood and felt rose up at once, a sweet, dusty smell that reminded her of sheets stored in a closet. She sat on the stool, which creaked, and tried a key at random.

She struck the A.

And something happened that had nothing to do with sound.

On the tip of her finger, where she touched the ivory, she felt a caress. A hand that wasn’t hers passed over the back of her hand, slow, recognizing her, from top to bottom, with the fingertip open and unhurried. Clara withdrew her fingers from the key and the caress stayed floating a second in the air, like a chord that keeps sounding after you lift your finger.

Her mouth went dry.

She played again. The A again, and again that hand over the back of her hand, and this time Clara noticed it was a big man’s hand, with a warm palm hollow and calloused fingers. She kept her finger pressed down and the caress went on climbing up her arm to her shoulder and raised the hairs on her neck.

“Okay,” Clara told herself, voice trembling. “Okay.”

She lowered her finger and struck the B-flat.

This time she felt a mouth. Not a mouth on her: someone else’s mouth kissing another person, a long, deep kiss, the kind given without haste and without witnesses. She felt the wetness of the other lip, the half-open hollow, the tongue entering slowly, and she felt on her own lower lip the soft bite that someone gave someone and that had been stored in that key for a hundred years. She ran her tongue over her lip without realizing. It tasted like someone else.

She struck the D.

And a laugh rose into her neck. Someone else’s laugh, low, pressed against a skin, the laugh that escapes when someone kisses your neck and tickles you, and Clara leaned back on the stool and laughed alone, her throat exposed to an empty ceiling.

The F put a hand on her waist. A whole hand, open, that grabbed her by the soft side and pulled her inward, and Clara felt the tug of a body dragging her toward another.

The C was the worst. The C put a weight on top of her. An entire body on top of hers, warm, insistent, rising and falling, and she felt—with no one touching her, sitting on a stool in an empty room—a deep, slow pressure in her lower belly, a weight that pushed to the bottom and withdrew and came back. She squeezed her knees together. She was hot. She was, for no reason, soaked through her panties.

The piano was an archive of caresses. Each key, an erotic fragment of someone who had played there. Clara suddenly understood what she had in front of her: not an instrument, but a memory of skin. Someone had loved on that piano. Several someones. For decades. And the piano, which had never learned to play music, had learned to store bodies.

She got up and went key by key, like someone leafing through a forbidden book.

On the G there was a hand on a thigh, high, near the groin. On the high A, lips climbing a neck and stopping at the ear. On the low E, a back arching. On the natural B, fingers unbuttoning a bodice and taking their time, because they were trembling. On the C-sharp, a mouth going down a belly and stopping halfway, not reaching, because someone liked to make someone wait. On the low G, two bodies standing, against a wall, with the haste of someone who has little time and the clumsiness of someone wearing too many clothes. On the high D, a short moan cut off abruptly, as if someone had walked into the room. On the low A, the calm afterward: slow breathing, two still bodies, a hand resting on a back asking for nothing. On the high E, nails digging into a nape. On the low F, a laugh against a shoulder. There were keys with moans. There were keys with silences, which are worse. There was one key, an F-sharp almost at the end, that stored an entire penetration: a slow entering, a staying, a pushing to the bottom and stopping there, breathing. Clara played it three times in a row. By the third her belly was tight and her hands were trembling.

She went from key to key and with each strike her skin prickled in a different place, as if the piano were running over her body in pieces, out of order, taking its time. And Clara, who had gone years without a man doing that to her, was surprised to find herself opening her arms so the piano’s memory could touch her better.

Then he arrived.

IV. Anselmo

She didn’t hear him come in. She felt, without turning, a presence in the doorway, and she knew it was a man from the smell and the weight of the breathing. And she knew, above all, that he was looking at her the way one looks at an instrument before knowing whether it’s in tune: with technical hunger. Cold, calculating, meticulous. And beneath the calculation, something else.

“It’s out of tune,” he said.

Clara stayed with her back turned, fingers on the keys.

“It’s charged,” she corrected.

The man let out a short laugh. He came closer, and Clara heard his steps on the wood and felt the air move beside her. He sat on the bench, next to her, without asking permission, without introducing himself. A shoulder against hers. Clara glanced at him: forty-something, dark curly hair, two days of beard, big hands, strong jaw. He smelled of tobacco and varnish.

She looked at his hands before his face: it was what she always did. Hands say more than a mouth. His were big, with wide knuckles and that soft callusing of someone who works with strings. Hands that knew how to hold without squeezing. Clara looked away before he caught her looking at them.

“Anselmo,” he said. “Tuner for the auction house. I’ve been asking for months to be allowed to examine it. Now they open the parlor and call in someone from outside. I’ve come to supervise.”

“Clara.”

“I know who you are. They told me you don’t hear pianos. You feel them.”

“And it’s true.”

“Okay,” he said, not entirely hiding his skepticism. Clara moved her case aside so as not to brush against him: she didn’t like another tuner putting her to the test as if she were an apprentice. Anselmo looked at the wood for a moment, more attentive than his distrust would suggest, and put both hands on the keyboard.

He played a chord.

And Clara felt it whole. Not a stray caress, but all of them at once: a chorus of foreign skins that ran over her from top to bottom, all the keys she had touched one by one, now together, sounding in her body like an orgasm of hands. Her knees buckled and she grabbed the edge of the piano.

Anselmo didn’t stop playing. He held her by the elbow with one hand while the other went on moving over the keyboard, and Clara felt the chord sink into her and search for her center, and that it was he who was directing it, he who decided which part of the piano’s body to strike so that a part of hers trembled. He was playing her. With both hands, through eighty-eight keys and a century of dead people.

“I see,” he said, very low, almost in her ear. “You don’t hear the piano. You feel it.”

“And so do you.”

“And so do I.”

Because it was true. Anselmo played and the keys gave things back to him: Clara saw it in his nape, in the way his jaw tensed, in the breath that caught in his E. Both were feeling the same thing, and neither owned what he felt. They were caressing each other through a hundred dead hands.

Anselmo stopped playing. He turned toward her on the bench. They were so close that Clara could see the pulse in his neck.

“And now what,” he said.

“Now,” said Clara, “we have to tune it.”

“To what?”

“To us.”

V. The Keyboard

They kissed without deciding to, on top of the keyboard, and the piano let loose a cluster of false and beautiful notes as it took the weight of their bodies. Anselmo’s mouth was warm and tasted of tobacco, and Clara, who had gone years without being kissed like that, with hunger, grabbed his shirt with both hands and pulled him. He put one hand on her nape, the other on her waist, and bent her back over the keys, and Clara had her back against the ivory and every time she moved a C or a G sounded.

He opened her blouse. Two buttons flew off. Anselmo pulled the fabric down to her waist and looked at her tits for a second, the way one looks at a piece before touching it, and then lowered his mouth and kissed the top of her chest, between the collarbones, and Clara felt her kiss answered by an old kiss stored in the B, a kiss that another mouth had given to another chest a hundred years earlier, and the two kisses, hers and the dead one’s, reached her at once, superimposed, and a moan escaped her that she didn’t recognize as her own.

Anselmo pulled one of her tits out of her bra with his hand, without ceremony, and put it in his mouth. He sucked. Clara arched. And beneath Anselmo’s tongue, biting her nipple, she felt another tongue, another mouth, another era, and a shiver climbed from her pussy to the roots of her hair. She grabbed his head and pressed it to her chest, and he bit and sucked and ran his tongue over her nipple until it was hard and shiny with saliva, and each pull of his mouth gave another pull lower down, in her belly, and Clara felt how her panties soaked.

They undressed in yanks, clumsy, laughing, bumping into the keys. He pulled her trousers down in one yank and Clara kicked them into the air, and the fabric fell to the floor with her panties inside, and she was left naked from the waist down on the piano, her back on the ivory and her legs dangling over the edge of the keyboard. Anselmo unbuttoned his trousers and pulled them down to his thighs, and Clara saw what he had: a thick, hard cock, with a taut, slightly wet tip, and she felt her pussy open on its own, as if a hand were helping it.

“Come,” she said.

He positioned himself between her legs, upright, his knees against the keyboard, and pushed with the tip without entering, sliding along the fold, searching. Clara was soaked. He ran the tip up and down, between her lips, brushing her clit, and each pass drew a short moan from her, and the piano, taking the sway of their bodies, let off random keys, an F, a B, a high D, and the sound and the friction reached Clara by different paths and joined together inside her.

“Don’t play,” she said. “Put it in me.”

Anselmo put it in. Slowly, with his hand at the base to guide it, and Clara felt him open her inch by inch, her pussy stretching around him, and she let out her breath in a rush when he reached the bottom. They stayed like that, still, he entirely inside, both breathing, and the whole piano began to sing on its own, with no one touching it: a long, low chord that went on and on.

“Listen,” Clara whispered.

“I’m listening.”

And he moved. Deep and slow, each movement a key, each key a caress from another era, and Clara with her back on the ivory and her hands gripping the edges of the piano, open, pushing toward him so he’d go deeper. He watched her from above, both hands on her waist, and Clara knew what he was seeing: her whole body open on a piano from 1890, her tits moving with each thrust, her back arched against the ivory, her mouth unclosed. She also knew he was calculating, because he was a tuner and knew how to do nothing else: he was searching for the angle, the height, the exact tilt of the keyboard’s edge that would make her moan louder. And he found it. He lowered his hips a little and changed the entry, and Clara let out a moan that came from lower down and that made a B-flat vibrate beneath her back that no one had played. And he didn’t stop watching her. Not once did he take his eyes off her body, and Clara, who had gone years fucking in the dark with her eyes closed, discovered that being watched while she was being fucked excited her as much as the hand on her waist. Each time he thrust, the wood gave her back another thrust, that of a body from 1910, that of a body from 1955, all at once, and Clara stopped distinguishing what was hers and what was the instrument’s. It was hers. It was everyone’s. Her man and all the men who had fucked there were fucking her, and a broad, ancient pleasure rose in her, which had nothing to do with the pleasure of a single body.

VI. The Lid

When they tired of the keyboard, they moved to the lid.

Clara lay on her back on the walnut, and the wood was warm against her back, like a belly. The dust stuck to her sweaty skin. She stretched her arms and her hands dangled over one side, and the keys, beneath her, went mute. Anselmo stood for a moment, looking at her whole, naked on the piano, and Clara, who had gone years without anyone looking at her like that, opened a little more so he’d see her well, and everything in her trembled when she noticed he was taking his time.

“Like that,” he said. “Still.”

He knelt between her legs, on the lid, and put his hands on her knees. He opened her legs until Clara felt the pull in her groin. And he lowered his mouth.

The first pass of his tongue was from bottom to top, slow, wide, from her hole to her clit, and Clara let out a long moan and arched against the wood. Anselmo opened her with his fingers, left her exposed, and set about eating her unhurriedly, first with the flat of his tongue, making wide circles around her clit, then with the tip, tapping it in short beats, and Clara felt her mouth fill with saliva and that she couldn’t close her legs because he kept them apart with his elbows.

And beneath Anselmo’s tongue she felt, superimposed, the tongues of everyone who had loved on that piano. A chorus of mouths climbing her thighs. One licking her slowly, another biting her softly, another pushing its tongue to the bottom and moving it, and all of them reached her at once through her skin, and Clara moaned so loud that the middle A vibrated on its own, tuned by pure chance.

“Don’t stop,” she gasped. “Please, don’t stop.”

He didn’t stop. He slipped two fingers inside her, turned them searching for her spot, and when he found it—that soft, ridged place a hand’s breadth from the entrance that you only find by going after it—Clara gave a short cry and dug her nails into his head. Anselmo smiled against her pussy. He kept going, patient, unhurried, his mouth hot and wet against her, the two fingers going in and out at a rhythm that was anything but clumsy, curved upward, pressing on each turn, and his tongue on her clit, fast, precise, merciless.

Clara closed her eyes. Pleasure rose in waves, closer and closer together, higher and higher, and with each wave the whole piano hummed low beneath her, as if taking part. She grabbed his head with both hands and fucked his face, moving her hips against his mouth, without shame, and Anselmo let her, let her use him, and slipped a third finger in and moved it deeper, and Clara felt everything closing, felt her pussy clenching around his fingers, felt it rising from her feet.

“I’m coming,” she warned, out of air. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

And she came. She came with his hand inside and his mouth on top, her thighs squeezed against his temples, with a long cry that broke in half, and her legs and her belly and even her teeth trembled, and the whole piano trembled with a low hum and a rain of false notes, and Clara stayed for a few seconds not knowing where her arms were.

Anselmo climbed up her body with kisses: her belly, her navel, between her tits, her neck. He lay on top of her, skin against skin, and Clara felt his hard cock against her hip, sliding in her own wetness, and she opened her legs so he’d settle. He kissed her on the mouth, and Clara knew herself on his lips, and that gave her a new heat.

“Now you,” she said.

He raised himself and entered her slowly, and it was as if the instrument opened from the inside. He went in whole at once, without the resistance of before, and Clara moaned at feeling full, and he stayed still inside, breathing into her neck, the weight of his body on her, and Clara wrapped her arms around his back and her heels around his waist, and squeezed, and felt him throb inside.

“Move,” she asked into his ear. “Fuck me.”

And he began to move. Deep and slow first, pulling out almost entirely and sinking back to the bottom, and Clara felt him leave and enter and each arrival hurt with pleasure. Faster afterward, with loose hips, banging her against the wood, and each thrust of his was a key; each key, a caress from another era. She watched his sweaty forehead, his open mouth, his half-closed eyes, his tense jaw. And she felt, beneath each of Anselmo’s thrusts, the thrust of others, of the dead, and all of them together gave her a pleasure that spilled out of her body. The piano sang on its own beneath them, a low hum that grew as they grew, as if the wood were a bellows that gathered their breath and gave it back as sound.

He turned her. Without pulling out, he grabbed her by the waist and put her on her side, then face down, and Clara found herself with her tits flattened against the warm walnut and her face turned to the side on the wood, and him on top, behind, entering again with his hand on her hip, and like that it was deeper, more animal, and Clara bit the lid and moaned against it and the piano gave her back the moan turned into a note. Anselmo grabbed her hair with one hand and pulled her head back, and bit her shoulder, and thrust faster, and Clara felt it rising again, the second one, deeper than the first, from the lowest place in her belly.

“Again,” he said, hoarse. “Come on, again with me.”

And she went. She came a second time pressing her face against the wood, with a hoarse moan, and he followed her a few seconds more, thrusting short and fast, until his breath broke and he finished inside her with his forehead stuck to her neck, panting, emptying himself in long spasms that Clara felt one by one, and while he emptied himself he gave a weak punch against the lid and the piano answered him with a seventh chord that no human being had ever played there.

They stayed still, sweating on the warm wood, him still inside, on top, heavy and good.

“Did you hear it?” she whispered.

“Perfect,” he said. “It’s perfectly in tune.”

“No. It’s tuned to us.”

And it was true.

The piano no longer repeated the caresses of the dead. It combined them with theirs. Clara noticed it when she raised herself on one elbow and put a hand on the keyboard: the note that sounded didn’t come from 1890 or 1955. It came from that afternoon. It was a new note, marked by the two of them.

Anselmo put his hand over hers, interlaced.

“Do you feel it?” said Clara.

“Yes.”

“It’s because we’ve changed it. It’s no longer an archive. Now it’s an instrument.”

Together, with all four hands, they played a single note.

The piano sounded as it hadn’t sounded in a hundred and thirty years. A round, full C, with a harmonic body that came from no hand separately but from the crossing, from the sum. It sounded so loud that the empty walls gave back the echo, and the echo came back smaller, and died, and left a thick silence, smelling of sex and wood.

“I’d never done this,” he said.

“Because before only one played it at a time,” she said. “It needed two.”

Clara had entered that parlor a resigned woman and came out something else, something that didn’t yet have a name. It wasn’t love, or not only. It was the certainty of having finally been touched with the same attention with which she touched things: listening, correcting, seeking the right tension. And that’s why, when she dressed, she didn’t have the feeling of dressing to leave, but of dressing to return.

They dressed slowly, without speaking, picking clothes up off the floor, and Clara knotted her blouse with the two buttons she had left. They looked at each other in the doorway, the white sheet in her hand again, and neither knew what to say, and neither needed to. Clara covered the piano again. She put her hand on the sheet, on the large sleeping shape, and this time the walnut beneath was warm because of them, because of the two of them, and no one else.

VII. The Second Thursday

Not everything was easy. The second Thursday, Anselmo arrived in a bad mood. He’d argued with the manager of the auction house, who wanted to move the Steinway to another floor to photograph it, and he came with his jaw tight and a half-opened bottle of wine in his hand. Clara saw him come in and knew, from how he stepped on the wood, that they weren’t going to talk much that afternoon.

“What happened to you?” she asked anyway.

“Nothing. That they want to sell it.”

“Right.” Clara stayed a moment with her hand on the sheet. “And you want to buy it?”

“I don’t know if I want to. Buying a piano like this is mortgaging yourself to a piece of wood we don’t even know where to put. —Anselmo set the bottle on the floor, came closer, and put both hands on her waist, from behind—. What I know is that I don’t want someone else to take it.”

And he pulled her blouse down off her shoulder and kissed her nape, slowly, unhurriedly, and Clara understood that that afternoon they weren’t going to fuck: they were going to something else. They sat on the floor, backs against the side of the piano, and opened the wine. They drank from the bottle, passing it back and forth, and didn’t talk about the auction. They talked about small things: about his daughter, who was eleven and studied violin, about a dog Clara had had and that had died on her, about how badly they’d both tuned during their first years. And Clara, with the bottle in her hand and her head on Anselmo’s shoulder, thought that it had been a long, long time since she’d sat on the floor with someone doing nothing.

Without the body in front of him, Anselmo talked differently: more slowly, looking at the floor, hands still on his knees. Clara discovered she liked him like that too, without the keys in between. They stayed until nightfall, with the wine half-drunk and the parlor in darkness, and when they got up to leave Clara realized they had barely touched each other again since sitting on the floor and that, even so, it had been one of the most intimate afternoons of her life.

VIII. The Notice

The third Thursday they found a paper stuck on the parlor door. A notice from the auction house: the Steinway was going up for auction in six months. Starting price, an absurd figure, inflated by the maker’s name. And below, in marker, the sentence that changed everything: “Do not handle the instrument until the final appraisal.”

“So we can’t play it,” said Anselmo, reading over her shoulder. “As if it were a piece of furniture.”

“It is a piece of furniture,” said Clara. “To them.”

“To us it isn’t.”

They both fell silent in front of the paper. Clara peeled it off carefully, folded it, and put it in her trouser pocket, and then went into the parlor, lifted the sheet, and sat at the piano. Anselmo followed her. They sat together on the bench, shoulder against shoulder, and Clara put her hands on the keyboard.

“How much does it cost?” she asked.

“A lot.”

“We can take out a loan.”

“Both of us?” he said. “It’s not just about taking out a loan. There’s transport to pay, a place to find, and upkeep. I have a daughter, Clara. For what? For a piano that isn’t ours and that doesn’t fit in any flat?”

Clara played a key. The F-sharp, the one with the stored penetration. Her belly rose at once, as always.

“For this,” she said. “For this it fits.”

Anselmo put his hand over hers. They stayed like that a while, with all four hands on the same block of keys, touching nothing, just resting. And Clara understood, with a clarity that almost hurt, that what frightened her wasn’t taking out a loan for that piano. It was taking it out together: committing to something neither of them could abandon without wounding the other. It frightened her. It also gave her a strange joy, with an edge.

“If we buy it,” said Anselmo slowly, “we’ll have to stop fucking on top of it.”

Clara turned her head and looked at him.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a museum piece. A Steinway from 1890. You don’t climb on top of a Steinway from 1890.”

Clara got up from the bench, stood in front of him, and unbuttoned her blouse button by button, looking him in the eyes. She took it off, let it fall to the floor, and then unbuttoned her trousers and let them fall too, and was left in her panties, standing, between him and the piano.

“Come,” she said. “We’re going to give it a resistance test.”

And she led him against the lid. She sat him on the edge, pulled his trousers down to his ankles, and knelt between his legs. She took his cock in her hand, held it upright, and put it in her mouth whole, in one movement, to the bottom, until she felt it touch the back of her palate. Anselmo let out a moan and put his hand on her head, and Clara began to go up and down, slowly, with her tongue pressed against the shaft, sucking, wetting it all, and each time she went down to the bottom she stayed a second with her nose against his belly and felt the cock throbbing inside her mouth.

“Stop,” he said after a while. “I’m going to come, and I want to be inside.”

Clara got up, took off her panties, and sat on top of him, straddling him, on the edge of the lid. She guided herself with her hand, put it at her entrance, and went down slowly, and felt him open her inch by inch until she was sitting entirely on him, her thighs against his hips. Both moaned at once. Clara began to move, slowly, with her hands on his shoulders and her forehead against his forehead, and he grabbed her ass with both hands and helped her go up and down, and each time she went down to the bottom the whole piano trembled.

“See how it holds up?” Clara gasped.

“It holds up,” he said. “It holds up.”

And he grabbed her waist and thrust from below, hard, and Clara came almost immediately, with her mouth stuck to his neck so as not to scream too loud, and he followed her with three more thrusts and emptied himself inside her with a grunt, squeezing her ass with both hands, trembling.

When they finished, the whole piano was still humming.

“It holds up,” Clara repeated, and laughed against his shoulder.

IX. The Heiress

The months passed. Clara and Anselmo kept seeing each other on Thursdays, sometimes in the parlor and other times away from that house; the auction date, at first remote, drew closer without them having found a way to pay for the Steinway. At the end of September, five days before the auction, a woman appeared in the parlor. She must have been eighty, with a wool coat and a cane, and she came in without knocking, as if the house were still hers, which it had been. She stood in the doorway, looking at the piano, and Clara and Anselmo, who were sitting on the bench without having started yet, jumped to their feet.

“Don’t bother,” said the woman. “I’ve come to see it one last time. I’m the heiress. All of this was my mother’s.”

She approached the piano slowly, with her cane, and put her hand on the walnut lid, in the same spot where Clara put hers. She left it there a good while, without speaking, eyes closed.

“It’s warm,” she said at last, and opened her eyes and looked at Clara. “It’s always warm. Since I was a child.”

Clara noticed the woman’s hands, resting on the cane: fine hands, with marked veins and a ring that slid loose on her finger. And she thought, with a sudden vertigo, that she was looking at her own future: that she too would return to that piano with wrinkled hands, and that she hoped there would then be someone young in the parlor to tell her that the walnut was warm.

Clara felt the color rise to her face.

“I feel it too,” she said.

“Of course you feel it. —The woman smiled, an old smile full of bad teeth—. You’re a tuner. And so is he. It shows. —She looked at the bench, the two bodies sitting too close together, Clara’s badly buttoned blouse—. And you two also...?”

“Yes,” said Anselmo, bluntly.

The woman laughed, a cracked and happy laugh.

“Thank God,” she said. “It was about time. Since my mother died I’ve been afraid this piano would be left with no one. She used to say the Steinway stored what happened on it, and I laughed. When I was thirteen I caught her here one night, with a man who wasn’t my father. —She ran her fingers over the lid—. It took me a long time to understand her. And even longer to dare to come back to this room for my own reasons.”

Clara stared at the keyboard. All the caresses, all the bodies, all the eras she had felt key by key finally had a name and a date. They belonged to that woman in the coat and cane, and to her mother, and to her mother’s men, and to hers. The piano was an archive, yes. And now Clara knew whose.

“I don’t want a stranger to take it,” said the heiress. “Some rich man who’ll put it in a lobby to fill space. I’ll tell the auction people. —She looked at Clara, then at Anselmo—. Do you want it?”

“Yes,” they both said at once.

“Do you have somewhere to put it?”

“No,” said Clara.

“It doesn’t matter. You’ll find somewhere. —The woman took a crumpled envelope from her pocket and held it out—. Here’s the appraisal I commissioned, not the figure they’ve put to attract buyers. I’m going to withdraw it from the auction and sell it to you for half the starting price if you promise me one thing.”

“Anything,” said Anselmo.

“That you keep climbing on top of it. —The woman laughed again—. That you don’t turn it into a museum piece. That it keeps storing. That when I die there’s more of you in this piano than of me. —She held out her hand to Clara, who shook it without knowing what to say.”

The three laughed. The woman left slowly, with her cane, and at the door she turned.

“When you move it, invite me. I want to hear it sound with the two of you inside it.”

X. The Thursdays

They bought the piano. The heiress withdrew it from the auction in time, but they couldn’t take it away right away. Between the loan, the search for a place, and the move, seven months passed. They weren’t seven months of doubt, but of installments, calls, and accounts done on the table, with half of both their salaries committed. Finally they took it to a ground-floor place Clara rented in the neighborhood, a spot with brick walls and a big skylight through which the afternoon light came in just like in the empty parlor. They put it in the center. They put a white sheet over it, the same one, from the first day, because Anselmo had kept it without saying anything.

The first night they slept in the place, on a mattress on the floor, next to the piano, Clara woke at dawn and put her hand on the lid. It was warm. The heiress was right: it was always warm. Clara stayed like that a while, hand on the walnut, in the dark, hearing Anselmo breathe beside her, and she thought of her father, of the list of addresses crossed off one by one, of twenty years of leaving other people’s houses with her neck in a knot. And she thought that at last she had an address she was never going to cross off.

The place was called Vilar and Anselmo, tuners. Below the name, on the glass of the door, Anselmo painted one more word by hand: and piano. Because the piano also tuned, in its own way.

Thursdays are still theirs. Now they no longer need to return to that empty house: the white sheet hangs from a nail, they lift it at six in the evening, and the Steinway, which already recognizes them by their steps, stretches out beneath like always. They’ve fucked in every position the lid allows and in some it doesn’t. One Thursday he took her standing, against the side of the piano, and she came with her cheek against the varnish. Another Thursday she sat on top of him, on the bench, and rode him slowly for a whole hour, and the piano sang a low hum that didn’t stop until they both finished at once. Another Thursday he slipped his hand under her skirt while she pretended to tune the high G, and she came standing, forehead on the lid, without stopping turning the wrench, and left the high G out of tune forever.

The heiress comes one Sunday a month, sits on the bench with her cane crossed over her knees, and asks them to play. And they play. He with one hand, she with the other, and sometimes all four together, and the piano sounds like what it is: like two bodies that have tuned each other.

She was no longer afraid of silence. Before, an empty house made her neck tense; now silence was just the hollow where the sound was going to fit. She had learned that a silent instrument isn’t dead: it’s waiting. And she, who had brought so many pianos out of mourning, had finally stopped being one of them.

And Clara, who had spent twenty years giving voices back to mute things, understood that hers had been given back to her too. That the gift had never been for pianos. That she had spent her life training her ear to recognize, when it came, the only tension that isn’t corrected with a wrench: that of a body tuning itself against another.

The Thursdays go on. And the piano, every time Clara and Anselmo come in, recognizes them by their steps. It stretches under the sheet, like an animal that hears the door. Clara lifts the cloth and puts her palm on the walnut; Anselmo puts his beside hers. The wood is warm, genuinely warm, and it throbs, and it tells them, without sound, that today too.