For All the Gold in the World Read Free

jazz is some kind of escape or therapy.”
    â€œThat’s exactly right.”
    â€œThen get interested in her music,” he recommended. “That’s the only place where you can meet her on common ground.”
    I ordered a glass of white wine, wondering, frankly, just how attractive I might be to a woman like her.
    Max the Memory showed up a few minutes later, interrupting my train of thought. He was furious. Along with the spritz, he ordered a panino with garlic salami and pickled vegetables.
    â€œThat woman’s out of her mind,” was the preamble to his usual rant. “And she isn’t even as thin as you’d expect from someone who chisels a hundred fifty euros out of you just for saying that a diet is sacrifice, and that if you want to lose weight you have to give up everything, and that it takes a stiff upper lip. And while she’s unloading this mountain of bullshit, she’s waving a bag of julienned fennel and carrots under my nose. She comes talking to
me
about sacrifice? And with that arrogant tone of voice? My life is so riddled with holes that if I wanted to fill them all up I’d have to eat a continent.”
    Max had turned purple. He practically grabbed the panino out of the waitress’s hand and chomped into it voraciously.
    The last time he’d had dealings with a weight-loss professional he’d vanished for three days; I’d finally tracked him down in an
agriturismo
in the countryside around Parma where they made a first-rate
gras pist
—pork lard, pounded and flavored—which he was a complete sucker for.
    For Max, too, the problem was the past. Shattered dreams, on the run from the law, then jail, his woman murdered by gangsters. Stories you couldn’t tell on a psychoanalyst’s couch.
    The fragility of existence haunted him. He was paying the price, just as yours truly and Rossini were, for living in a world made to measure, in a niche halfway between a world of crime that horrified us and a decadent country that had no intention of changing.
    â€œI’m done with this crap,” he grumbled through a mouthful of food. “It’ll go however it goes. I don’t have the energy to pretend I’m a civilian.”
    We smoked a couple of cigarettes in silence, watching the people crowded around the fruit and vegetable stands.
    â€œTonight I’m going to pay a call on Siro Ballan,” I said suddenly.
    Max stared at me, chewing the news over. Then a beautiful woman walked by; distracted by her ass, he went back to watching the passersby.

P ART O NE

 
    S iro Ballan wasn’t much good as a luthier. Actually, he wasn’t much good as a human being either. He was as mediocre as his instruments. He was a tall, skinny man, resentful and unpleasant, who lived all alone in a big house in the country that had belonged to his family for generations. He turned the old granary into a workshop, which smelled of essential oils, shellac, and all sorts of wood: Norway spruce, cherrywood, maple, ebony, rosewood, and boxwood. Along the walls, in no particular order, were a number of tables on which were scattered pieces of soundboxes, as well as necks that went with violins, mandolas, and double basses, all covered with a light layer of dust.
    Siro Ballan didn’t live off the money he earned from musicians. Over time, he’d built a reputation in the field, but that wasn’t what he’d been aspiring to when he’d stubbornly sat down to learn a profession for which he clearly had no gift whatsoever.
    If he could afford a certain kind of life, it was due to his large house, which he rented out by the hour. If a gang of bank robbers needed a quiet little place to wait for the police to tire of chasing them, then the luthier would offer them his stables, where it was possible to hide automobiles and delivery vans.
    Generally speaking, the most asked-after spot in the house was the living room, reserved for