When Bees Do Their Job Properly

I remember his caterpillar moustache, his puffy jacket and his fish hook glance as he cruised me in a record store in Milan, but I have no memory of the conversation that passed between us. His small talk must have been revelatory because twenty minutes later I was on a crowded train with him choo-chooing through the snow laden countryside towards the town where he lived.
I remember his shaved head as it bobbed slightly with each jolt of the train, but a decade later I have difficulty recalling anything about his voice or how pronounced his accent was. At some point he must have told me his name, but this obvious detail is now lost to me too.
The train came to a shuddering halt in Cremona and after we disembarked he led me through the dark, silent streets of the town as if we were cold war spies. It was obvious to me that no one cared about our clumsy progress (I was hefting a backpack, he was lugging groceries) but nevertheless he would stop suspiciously at each corner before pushing on with more purpose than before.
We kept to the shadows like rats until we reached his apartment, stopping only once so that he could point out the grey, nondescript building where Antonio Stradivari used to live. I must have looked unconvinced because he repeated the word violin a number of times before I nodded and said yes, I know who he is.
My new friend’s building was equally grim and unremarkable, but when I followed his shopping bags through the front door I was stopped short by the bewildering sight of violin after violin suspended in the freezing air. They were strung across his ceiling like small monkeys and each instrument was in a different stage of construction: some were as pale as pine and still waiting for their first lick of glue to dry, others were varnished a deep shade of walnut with strings freshly gutted from the innards of some unfortunate creature.
I wanted to stand absolutely still and admire them but he’d already tossed my backpack in a corner and was dragging me to the cold bed where we kissed and fumbled around like amateurs. I’d travelled a long way but I wasn’t in the mood anymore. All I craved was to sit in the adjoining room with a glass of wine and ask questions about his astonishing wooden treasures.
I tried to sleep but in the dead of night he brushed my forehead and told me with great seriousness that he loved me, although perhaps this is something that every Italian feels compelled to say when they know that time is short and that their beloved has to catch a flight to Sydney the next day.
In any case he woke me at an early hour with toast and fresh coffee and said that before I left he would play me an arpeggio with one of the walnut violins.
I sat up promptly and waited for him to test the strings and adjust the pegs, but as he dragged the bow across the instrument I knew it was a mistake to have shown such unabashed interest in his craft.
The sound was horrible, the same high-pitched vampiric noise that chalk makes when it screeches across a blackboard.
When he finished playing he stood there beaming and asked what I thought of the instrument and the only thing I could say was honey, it sounds just like honey when the bees are doing their job properly.
He wrote his name and address on a scrap of paper but I’m sure I tossed it away as soon as I reached the train station. I figured that if he loved me that much he would have played at least four and a half minutes of John Cage.