The Woman Who Tuned the Museum's Piano

Nobody noticed when Graciela Funes stopped coming.

She had serviced the Bösendorfer in the museo's salon every four months for, I believe, twenty-two years — arriving each time with a canvas bag of felt tools and a tuning lever wrapped in chamois, as though it were a surgical instrument, which in a manner of speaking it was. I would watch her from the doorway when my afternoon permitted it. There was nothing theatrical in the work. She would lift the lid, set a small lamp at the angle she preferred, and begin moving through the strings with the concentrated silence of someone reading a letter she had already memorised.

I came to the museum in 1978 and she was already a fixture, already greying at the temples, already possessed of that economy of gesture one associates with people who have made their peace with repetitive and necessary labour. We exchanged few words in the early years. She called me Señor Villalba. I called her Señora Funes. The Bösendorfer stood in the corner of the salon where we sometimes held small concerts — chamber pieces, the occasional lieder evening — and between these events it sat beneath a green cloth, patient as a very old animal.

Over time I learned, in fragments, that she had trained as a concert pianist in Córdoba, had come to Buenos Aires as a young woman full of ambitions that the city neither confirmed nor entirely extinguished, and had arrived at piano tuning not through defeat, as one might lazily assume, but through a genuine and growing curiosity about the instrument's interior life. She said to me once, without self-pity, that playing had given her the music that was written, but tuning gave her the music that was possible. I have spent considerable time since with that sentence.

The Bösendorfer was not an especially distinguished instrument. It had been donated by a family whose name I no longer recall, and it had suffered — water damage to the soundboard in the sixties, a cracked pin block repaired imperfectly before my time. Graciela was candid about its limitations. She would say, with a small precise smile, that she was not making it beautiful, only making it honest. She used that word: honest. It has stayed with me in the way certain words do when they arrive from an unexpected direction.

I left the museum in 2006, and Graciela, I think, continued for some years after. I heard nothing definitive. The kind of person she was does not generate news.

Last spring I received a letter — paper, handwritten, which startled me — from a young musicologist in Rosario who was compiling a study of Buenos Aires' piano technicians across the twentieth century. He had found my name in the museum's old visitor registers and written to ask if I had known any of the craftspeople who serviced the instruments during my tenure. He mentioned Graciela Funes. He had found almost nothing. A brief listing in a 1983 guild directory. A single reference in the concert programmes from 1991. Nothing more.

I sat with his letter for several days before answering.

What I wrote to him was the following: that Graciela Funes had understood something that most musicians and certainly most visitors to that salon had not — that an instrument's voice is not a fixed property but a negotiated one, requiring regular and attentive maintenance the way any living relationship does. That she had kept a flawed and ageing Bösendorfer in a condition of imperfect but genuine expressiveness for more than two decades. That at least three concerts I could name, performances that the audience remembered as particularly fine, were fine in part because of what she had done quietly in the week before. That her name appeared in none of the programmes.

He wrote back quickly, with gratitude, and asked if he might quote my letter. I told him yes, of course, though I felt the inadequacy of what I had provided. Words about a craft are not the craft. My account of her would stand in for her in his study the way a reproduction stands in for a painting — serviceable, diminished, better than nothing.

There is a particular category of loss I have spent my professional life among: the work that survives but whose maker dissolves into anonymity, the brushstroke legible on the canvas long after the hand that made it is forgotten. Graciela Funes left no canvas. The Bösendorfer, I am told, was deaccessioned some years ago — sold at modest valuation to a music school in Flores.

Somewhere in that instrument, if you knew how to listen, there might still be an echo of her patience. Or perhaps not. Perhaps that is merely what I wish were true, which is itself a kind of testimony.

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