gains a hundred years of absolution! In fact, I’m confident that I can persuade God to grant me an extension.’
Smiling broadly and brimming over with self-confidence, she sailed out of the archive and left me standing there, looking like a complete idiot. She’s just like my father was, I muttered to myself furiously. An absolute carbon-copy.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day started off cloudy and rainy, and I spent the whole morning in the shop, poring over bills and dealing with customers. On my desk were various letters from some of my regulars asking for information about items in my catalog, as well as two or three flyers for auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s due to be held in London and New York over the next few months. The prospect of spending a good while without any ‘special assignments’ (at least until December, when I had to arrange the delivery of the icon) was a very welcome one. Inspiring even, and I was seriously thinking of joining a gym or signing up at some language school to improve my appalling German and maybe to start learning Russian.
The design of my storefront was the result of much thought and expensive research by my father back in the ‘seventies. The last thing he wanted was that boring and uptight look favored by your typical antique store. So he had it painted in a very bright green, dotted with tiles and capped with large gold lettering. OK, maybe that sounds a little bit loud for a business like ours, but - strange as it may seem - it really looked pretty good: an open facade with two big shop windows, separated by an elegant wooden Italian-style entrance door (also painted green, but darker) and reached by three steps, given that the street was on a slope.
The major attraction offered by Antigüedades Galdeano was our fine collection of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings, in color and in black-and-white, and our impressive selection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish mirrors. But we also had the finest range of furniture,
bargueño
desks, paintings, silver and pottery in the whole of northern Spain. We had always tried to maintain a clear difference between what we sold in the shop and what we sold out of the dungeon: an antique dealer specializing in the sale of eighteenth-century
bargueños
was highly unlikely to know very much about fourteenth-century Gothic polychrome wooden carvings, for instance.
Our customers were both expert and demanding and, on the whole, bought exclusively through intermediaries. For that reason, my father devoted enormous energy and consideration to making sure that our catalogs were classy and exquisite, a task which I had inherited and made my own, doing all the design and lay-out on my computer, from start to finish. For the photographs, I hired one of the top professional studios in Madrid, and to print the catalog - in runs of 500 or 1000 copies - I used Martí B. Gráficas S.A. of Valencia, universally acknowledged as the best in their field.
When I got home at lunchtime, the glorious smell of garlic soup and veal T-bone steak set my mouth watering. On the Saint Petersburg job, I had lost almost half a stone of my already limited reserves. My excessive skinniness, apart from being a family trait and downright unattractive, drove Ezequiela to distraction and led to her preparing me gargantuan feasts worthy of a sumo wrestler.
‘Is the food ready?’ I yelled from the hallway.
‘In a minute or two!’ she shouted back.
I frowned in disappointment and headed for the study. While my store boasted nothing more high-tech than its power supply and an alarm system, to avoid frightening off the antiques customers who hated the sight of anything more recent than nineteenth-century, I made up for it at home, big-style. With one hand, I turned my sound system on by remote control and set my
Jarabe de Palo
CD to play, and with the other I switched on my awe-inspiring PC, as I dropped into my ergonomic desk chair and
Smiling broadly and brimming over with self-confidence, she sailed out of the archive and left me standing there, looking like a complete idiot. She’s just like my father was, I muttered to myself furiously. An absolute carbon-copy.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day started off cloudy and rainy, and I spent the whole morning in the shop, poring over bills and dealing with customers. On my desk were various letters from some of my regulars asking for information about items in my catalog, as well as two or three flyers for auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s due to be held in London and New York over the next few months. The prospect of spending a good while without any ‘special assignments’ (at least until December, when I had to arrange the delivery of the icon) was a very welcome one. Inspiring even, and I was seriously thinking of joining a gym or signing up at some language school to improve my appalling German and maybe to start learning Russian.
The design of my storefront was the result of much thought and expensive research by my father back in the ‘seventies. The last thing he wanted was that boring and uptight look favored by your typical antique store. So he had it painted in a very bright green, dotted with tiles and capped with large gold lettering. OK, maybe that sounds a little bit loud for a business like ours, but - strange as it may seem - it really looked pretty good: an open facade with two big shop windows, separated by an elegant wooden Italian-style entrance door (also painted green, but darker) and reached by three steps, given that the street was on a slope.
The major attraction offered by Antigüedades Galdeano was our fine collection of seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century engravings, in color and in black-and-white, and our impressive selection of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Spanish mirrors. But we also had the finest range of furniture,
bargueño
desks, paintings, silver and pottery in the whole of northern Spain. We had always tried to maintain a clear difference between what we sold in the shop and what we sold out of the dungeon: an antique dealer specializing in the sale of eighteenth-century
bargueños
was highly unlikely to know very much about fourteenth-century Gothic polychrome wooden carvings, for instance.
Our customers were both expert and demanding and, on the whole, bought exclusively through intermediaries. For that reason, my father devoted enormous energy and consideration to making sure that our catalogs were classy and exquisite, a task which I had inherited and made my own, doing all the design and lay-out on my computer, from start to finish. For the photographs, I hired one of the top professional studios in Madrid, and to print the catalog - in runs of 500 or 1000 copies - I used Martí B. Gráficas S.A. of Valencia, universally acknowledged as the best in their field.
When I got home at lunchtime, the glorious smell of garlic soup and veal T-bone steak set my mouth watering. On the Saint Petersburg job, I had lost almost half a stone of my already limited reserves. My excessive skinniness, apart from being a family trait and downright unattractive, drove Ezequiela to distraction and led to her preparing me gargantuan feasts worthy of a sumo wrestler.
‘Is the food ready?’ I yelled from the hallway.
‘In a minute or two!’ she shouted back.
I frowned in disappointment and headed for the study. While my store boasted nothing more high-tech than its power supply and an alarm system, to avoid frightening off the antiques customers who hated the sight of anything more recent than nineteenth-century, I made up for it at home, big-style. With one hand, I turned my sound system on by remote control and set my
Jarabe de Palo
CD to play, and with the other I switched on my awe-inspiring PC, as I dropped into my ergonomic desk chair and
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