When Francisco bought the house from the Civera family and set about renovating it, he didn’t ask me to do the carpentry work; he wanted an expert. The builders had uncovered the original limestone façade and doorway. The man he had put in charge of restoring the woodwork left the main door and the beams — all made of pinewood — like new. They had also restored all the dining-room furniture (you know about wood, Esteban, and, as you can see, these are an antiquarian’s dream, they could fill a room in a museum), along with all the closets, freestanding and fitted, all the dressers, coffee tables, beds, cupboards, shelves and mantelpieces around the house. The furniture was made of walnut, cherry, lime, kingwood, jacaranda, a veritable catalogue of styles and materials, the furnishings in the kitchen, living room and dressing rooms, were all included in the price of the house, everything: tables, beds, bedside tables, dressers, closets, they didn’t take a thing, look, I’ll show you, they even left this bargueño desk, can you imagine, and this little marquetry table, inlaid with ivory. The house looks like new now or even better, because we’ve improved the varnishes, stripped off any botched retouching done twenty or thirty years ago using really bad-quality varnish that was damaging the wood and corroding it, plus, we’ve treated the woodwork for termites and got rid of a patch of woodworm too. The Civera siblings couldn’t stand each other and so they sold the house as a job lot — no argument about what’s yours and what’s mine, just cash in hand; imagine how much all this would have fetched if sold at auction or in antique shops, but no, they preferred just to take the money and run. They got far less than they could have, but at least that way they didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of arguing about it face-to-face or giving in to each other: they paid for their pride — an extremely expensive and old-fashioned piece of merchandise. And then, along the way, they’d lost more of their inheritance to the Lord so to speak, because, as was the case with so many houses in those days, the wills weren’t drawn up by notaries, but by priests, and part of the inheritance went to a very devout aunt, who gave it to the church, and so the sharing-out of spoils proved fairly ruinous for the family, victims of both religious and human prejudices — well, money and religion do tend to make for a fairly poisonous combination. The foolish squabbles of one of those old families that had been going downhill for decades. Francisco wanted to show me the exquisite woodwork, as well as the restoration work that was being carried out. I knew the house already, having been there a couple of times to carry out a few minor jobs with my father, who, many years before, had repaired a kitchen cabinet for them and a few closets in the ironing room. He eyed the furniture in those rooms with dread. He trembled, he had no confidence in himself, frightened in case he bungled a job that was not only the most important he’d ever been given, but had been given to him by what was certainly his most important customer to date, the head of the Civera household. Even though the work we were called on to do was only in the servants’ quarters, everything around us oozed class. The cabinets in the kitchen and the pantry were made of limewood, and the kitchen cabinets had a carved geometric design on them. All he had to do was repair some doors under the sink and on a couple of cabinets and, in the ironing room, to refurbish some cupboards decorated with a floral motif. These were by no means routine jobs, however, and, in the case of those cupboards, required a certain degree of skill. The skill of a cabinetmaker. But he was frightened. He tried to hide this from me, but I could tell he was nervous. When we arrived, the maid led us to the back of the house, and, on the way, with a lift of his chin, my father indicated to me the many fine pieces of furniture, and whispered in my ear, showing off his expert knowledge: the display cabinets, the ornamentation on the banisters, the delicate work on the oak handrails, the carved newel caps, but also the filigree ironwork on the balconies, and the leaded stained-glass window on the mirador. His eyes shone with tears. That same afternoon, he asked me not to go with him: you’ll just get in the way, he said, but I knew it was because he didn’t want me to see his lack of skill or, rather, his fear of that lack of skill, because that isn’t the story he had told me, and those weren’t the hands capable of carving the table in his office, with its medallions, human figures and
grottesche, the skills of someone who’d once wanted to be a sculptor.